Not sure what we can get from this article as there are so many variables... What "digital" spend was cut: paid search? online video? paid social media? brand vs. product oriented?
What was the impact of non-marketing drivers like distribution, price, promo, competition, and the economy?
What was the impact of (new) ad creative?
Maybe take it as they are under pressure to cut expenses and cutting marketing, digital and likely non-digital, certainly helps.
I don't think it really matters. The reality is that the Ad space is ridden with fraud, poorly performing networks, platforms and methods and I believe we will see an increase of companies dropping spending in digital advertising or at least consolidate around what works and internalize their ad buying (which has been done by ad buyers who literally rip customers off in the fees they take compared to the value they deliver)
Talking about fraud, bad websites, etc. means that it's largely display advertising.
As a user, good-riddance. As a marketer, good-riddance. It's an awful platform with WAY too much money in it right now. The rise of improved algorithms for targeting promised new paths to customer acquisition but has largely been a way to bring in lots of money without delivering true results.
I'm the same and did not discover this until about the 5th time I took the Myers-Briggs Personality Test. My initial tests had me almost exactly between extroversion and introversion.
On my last test, the facilitator explained the energy/stress aspect with a number of examples like your dinner party. She also mentioned people are naturally one or the other, not 50/50.
I realized that my natural inclination was introversion. I believe that what I perceived as my extroverted side was learned through a social upbringing to engage others, which is beneficial. There are a number of social/extroverted things that I sincerely enjoy but I walk away exhausted.
This is where a good analytical (as opposed to operational) data model comes into play. Something less normalized that is intuitive and efficient to use.
Event data is difficult to denormalize within a relational database. You can group events by actor (e.g. the user performing the events) and stuff it all into a single row. You'll get great performance but you'll have to custom process your data which is in a custom format. SQL functions will become useless.
You can also store every event as a row and pull it out through Hadoop to process (as another commenter mentioned) but you're going to get huge performance bottlenecks just in extracting the data from the database, serializing it, transferring to another server for processing, and then deserializing it. Not to mention that MapReduce is batch-oriented so it's not going to be real-time.
In a typical data environment for an event table, you can have a user_history table with the unique_primary_key, timestamp, user_id, attribute_column_name, Previous_value, and Subsequent_value.
If you want to know what users who did X and later did Y, couldn't you select all of the users who did X in a subquery and then find out how many of those user_id's match user_id's of people who did Y, where the timestamp on Y is between the X's timestamp and X's timestamp + some_predetermined_amount_of_time?
I am out of my depth, but isn't there some database best practice for tracking user session start and stop times?
Edit: I wrote this comment before I saw a different comment of yours above, which I think answers my question.
To an extent , yes.
Although basecamp is something that is intended more as an internal tool that just happens to work over HTTP and is not directed at any specific market niche (other than perhaps general SMB).
Let's think about real estate as an example.
I imagine that pretty much every real estate agent will want the following features on their website:
A list of properties (that can be sorted by Price etc)
Search By Postcode/Zipcode.
Then a page for each property with:
Pictures from inside/outside the property.
Asking Price.
Number of bedrooms/bathrooms.
Some blurb about the property.
A form to book a viewing (possibly integrated with calendering at the backend).
Of course they will also want the generic "contact us" pages and pages about how great they are.
You could develop all of this bespoke every time for each estate agent, but then the amount of time you invest and how good you can make it are capped by the amount of money they want to spend on the project. You also have to worry about hoating arrangements for each client.
Alternatively you could just build the best real estate website you can make, host it on your own infrastructure and charge a monthly fee to rent an "instance" of it. Because the website is already built activation can be instant.
As an added benefit (if you get enough users) you now have a huge database of properties which you could potentially use to launch your own property search/comparison website.
You will have customers who will require more custom functionality and will eventually outgrow your "one size fits all" system regardless of how customisable you make it. At this point however they are probably willing to pay a significant amount of money to have a bespoke website developed. Another option at this point would be to license them the sourcecode for your system so that they can take it elsewhere for modification.
Despite what people think, AI isn't about any kind of "liberal agenda", they're just about wrongful imprisonment, torture, and basic human rights.
That'll get you started in statistics, and then you can start looking for the various Dept. of Correction websites in each state to see what initiatives they have, and you might even be able to get at their stats (although usually you have to ask or FOIA to get them).
"Human rights" is a liberal concept! Paine and Mill were liberals. Without liberalism, the idea of human rights never would have existed. Indeed, you can almost define liberalism as that political philosophy which exalts human rights as the highest good.
The Bureau of Justice collects statistics annually thanks to the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Here's a link to a relatively recent study based off of a survey of over 80,000 inmates:
Regarding R's processing power, I haven't found it to be an issue. When building a model and testing, I use a sample of the data which is usually less than 100,000 observations. I use samples even when using a tool like SAS Enterprise Miner.
As far as scoring, I usually export using PMML and run it natively on the database. Makes for fast execution. PMML is available in R, RapidMiner, and other packages.
As far as outsourcing, I have some info on how to communicate with the developer, not get ripped off, etc. But what about IP? Should I assume that any code that is outsourced has come from other projects and/or the code that I'm paying to have developed will be used by others in the future? Is there any way to control this (especially when dealing with a dev thru a computer screen)?
If you are supplying the developer with algorithms that are specific (critical/unique) to your business, then for the avoidance of doubt you should make explicit in the contract that you own the IP for any work the developer does for you.
It's unlikely that anyone would use a developer that they didn't know personally, without a formal contract, for this type of work though.
On the other hand, if you're asking for a vanilla e-commerce site then it's less relevant, the code the developer uses may come from open source libraries, or it may be his that he his re-using, but it probably matters little to you as it's the content on the site not the code behind it that you really care about.
You will always own the copyright on the website, including the design artefacts, unless you are explicitly licensing them.
Ideally you would also somehow get the developer to verify that all the code they are using has a valid licence, as ultimately you're probably liable for infringement. Again, I guess this is trickier to do in a web based developer market, but probably not going to be an issue for a vanilla job like an e-commerce site or marketplace.
What was the impact of non-marketing drivers like distribution, price, promo, competition, and the economy?
What was the impact of (new) ad creative?
Maybe take it as they are under pressure to cut expenses and cutting marketing, digital and likely non-digital, certainly helps.