NP: Metric, Fantasies

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story about the growth of analytics in adverstising. On the one hand, you could take this as part of the same trend I flagged the other day about the rise of the "datarati." On the other, this doesn't really seem all that new.

I actually spoke with Julia Angwin -- editor of the Digits blog at WSJ.com and a friend from college -- about this yesterday at an event for her MySpace book, and she at least started off firmly in the latter camp. Haven't advertisers -- and interactive advertisers, in particular -- been doing this for a long time? Wasn't the whole promise of all Internet advertising back to the banner ad predicated on measurability and accountability? Heck, the headline on my LinkedIn profile is "Making and Enabling Data-Driven Decisions Since 1992."

On some level, this seems like the journalistic equivalent of the person who forwards the joke they just heard on the Internet to everyone they know, despite that joke having existed and having been forwarded millions of times already. Or the person who "discovers" a band on its major-label debut, not knowing of the indie releases that preceded it. Basically, it's not news until it happens to you or someone you know.

Except that this may have real implications, in that analytics is really going mainstream. Maybe this idea of looking at data is actually new to a certain subset of marketing people that previously avoided it, which is, in and of itself, a big deal.

Theoretically, this should be good for my job prospects, once companies start hiring again.