Power to the numbers people!

Ah, marketing. The last creative bastion of making fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, intuitive, gut-level “decisions” (okay, hunches) for ways to sell more stuff to more people while tossing caution and budgets to the wind.

Things have changed, and marketers, like it or not, have now met their match in math—or perhaps they’ve found new friends in finance?

In fact, as a cover story in Business Week, Why Math Will Rock Your World, asserts, companies built with math at the foundation are shaking up advertising and marketing like never before, thanks to data and calculations, and the implications of this reality are working their way through marketing departments large and small.

In the January 23, 2006 Business Week cover story, writers Stephen Baker and Bremen Leak assert that new companies like Google and other search companies are using math in new ways to understand customer behavior, create marketing programs, mine data to profile customers, and seek more business and new contracts.

In other words, these companies have their stuff together, and they are driving more business via the Web and data-capture through Web, and they are illustrating and now proving to others how data can help drive bottom-line results and make better marketing decisions.

The Business Week article cites a study conducted with 30 blue-chip companies, and run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau about 18 months ago. The study was designed to measure the effectiveness of advertising in a host of media. As the study showed, Ford Motor Company discovered in quantifiable ways and with hard numbers that it could have sold $625 million worth of product if it had increased its online ad budget 3.5% to 6% of total, according to the article.

Would that get your attention if you were the CMO?

The article further states that Ford in August 2005 announced that it was moving 30% of its $1billion ad budget into targeted media directed to individual customers, half of it through online advertising – a move the writers say will generate even more data and give “greater clout to the numbers people.”

The article further suggests that quantitative analysts and the function of data analysis will grow in importance. Perhaps this might be time to take your new-found “quant” friends to lunch?