Data Isn't A Strategy
The news has put a few things front and centre.
Micro-targeting, lookalike modelling, data sets, data testing, data, data, and data.
People are up and arms about what's come out about Cambridge Analytica. They should be. And they should expect more than just an apology in a traditional media publication. I mean, why didn't Facebook just dominate all the ad space on its platform for, like, 30 minutes and run apology ads?
Anyway...
People are upset. But some people are also pointing to President Obama's 2012 election win - the one where his team implemented a strategy of:
"Running a national campaign like a local ward election, where the interests of individual voters were known and addressed."
Wonder if that strategy came from data? Or maybe a collection of experiences shared by people through a variety of ways like personal stories or things they had heard or seen?
See, Facebook targeting isn't anything new. It's just a new way to justify a loss.
Yes, the means by which Cambridge Analytica obtained the data they had and the ways it used the data were wrong. But it’s not like Hillary Clinton’s team ran a knockout campaign. What was their strategy? How was it formulated?
I’m almost finished reading The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene. The book's preface has a quote I like a lot:
“In war, strategy is the art of commanding the entire military operation. Tactics, on the other hand, is the skill of forming up the army for battle itself and dealing with the immediate needs of the battlefield itself.”
Too often we forget the difference between strategy and tactics. Too often we think they are the same and turn to tactical tools — such as Facebook or polling data — thinking that will be the answer and lead us towards seizing the day, choosing immediacy over unequivocal long term success.
We make this trade by forgetting to define what it is we want to do in the grandest of ways: bring people together or create cultural divisiveness, spread lies or spread hope, communicate for good or communicate for bad?
Yes, there is an evil side to the application I'm referring to here. But there is also the good - as exemplified in the 2012 election I cited above.
For every positive action there is a negative reaction and vice versa, right?
But creating the positive result we desire is and always will be a challenge. We can't allow ourselves to think that good intentions and hope can carry us through. We need to think deeper, understand greater, and craft a way for good intentions to flourish, inspire, and cause action.
Because...
Strategy is tougher than uploading data sets into computer programs.
Strategy is more difficult than ensuring audience sizes are sufficient.
Strategy is hard work.
So hard it is often forgotten.
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Thanks for the great piece. Just spoke about this at a conference. By definition data is rhetorical; its value is in its use. It can tell you the "what" but human emotion will tell you the "why".
Reminds me of a Deming quote. "Information is not knowledge. Let’s not confuse the two."
Well said Kyle. We’ll always be playing this game, it’s never ending so we need to have our eye on the long term war while we fight the short term battle. I think the bigger challenge is changing the way we view success. Building a lasting brand vs. building a good quarter.
Data is like alphabet, it can be words, sentences, information, strategy only when you arrange/decrypt them properly to make "sense" out of it.
Data enables a strategy. Data in isolation has zero context.