Psychology in online dating and dashboard I: halo effects

OkCupid made headlines this week by boosting about running many experiments on its users and having fun doing it (http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/we-experiment-on-human-beings/) My current blog does not discuss the ethical implications of such research; for that see instead my previous blog on such experiments at Facebook https://analyticdashboards.wordpress.com/2014/07/03/dont-leave-big-data-to-computer-scientists-facebook-you-need-marketing-and-psychology/ Today I want to talk about the results of research,…

Help your creative cats bring home the bacon!

Creative folks often appear afraid of accountability in marketing: like a playful cat, they fear bean counting will hamper their play.  As Jennifer Zeszut of Beckon puts it “We marketers spend our time and money executing in channels, and all those activity metrics mean nothing to the business. Marketing leaders are looking for strategic metrics, diagnostic measures and aggregate…

Will Facebook really lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017?

By now we have all heard about the (non peer-reviewed) study by Princeton faculty that Facebook would lose 80% of its users between 2015 and 2017 (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf), and Facebook’s hilarious rebuttal that Princeton will run out of students by 2021 (http://www.engadget.com/2014/01/24/facebook-issues-princeton-rebuttal/). It is always hard to predict human behavior (especially in the future J) and…

On the profitability of measuring returns to advertising: asking the right attribution questions

Do you sell or buy insights on the attribution of business performance to different (online) advertising forms? Then you must have heard about Google’s Randall Lewis and Microsoft’s Justin Rao “On the Near Impossibility of Measuring the Returns to Advertising”. Lewis and Rao analyze 25 experiments with hundreds of thousands of randomly exposed internet users,…