Bad Data Kills

I can already hear the fomenting wrath of the all-powerful data gods threatening their terrible wrathiness upon my soft-bodied body.

But let's get 4 things out there:

1) Data is sold as a decision-making tool, intended to replace the magic 8 ball of "subjective" expert opinion with hashtag#facts .

2) Most data comes from the same handful of companies, using the same-ish methodology.

3) This methodology wasn’t developed to offer the most useful data, just the data that is most easily collected and reported.

4) Data requiring more effort to capture is not only ignored, it's dismissed as fantasy, a pretend love-child between a Big-footed Mermaid and Chupa-Nessie. As if only what is easily observable is factually true.

To understand how ridiculous this is, let's get science-y.

Way back before we had hashtag#vr , we had face organs called “eyes,” and we used our “eyes” to observe the world. One of the many alarming things our primitive eye-ball-using ancestors noticed is that when you leave meat out, maggots would appear. The prevailing theory, supported by eye-balling conjecture-ists everywhere was that meat spontaneously generated maggots. Then @Francesco Redi, an Italian physician, biologist, and poet with an excellent nose, discovered that covering meat so that no flies could get to it, caused 0 maggots. Turns out meat does not spontaneously generate maggots, flies having meaty fly sex does.

This quaint way of thinking is called “science” and it’s been very helpful in developing lots of very useful things that we enjoy today, like STD ointments and microwave popcorn.

When doing science, science-ologists like to look for what is actually causing an observable phenomenon, not just what is most easily observed. Meat can be easily observed to cause maggots. However, more careful observations reveal the shocking truth that flies cause hashtag#flybabies.

The wholesale acceptance of incomplete and barely accurate data is on us. We routinely buy hashtag#data from sources that have no interest in its actual usefulness and are wholly focused on creating a product with the appearance of usefulness.

One of the biggest results in hashtag#advertising , hashtag#marketing, and hashtag#media is enabling a Dunning-Kruger pandemic. Where people who are in no way hashtag#communications experts, gear up with heaps of minimally accurate data, and abandon all hesitation in telling actual experts that they are completely wrong.

This is bad data. And the danger isn’t that it's wrong, it's that it seems true enough to supplant actual knowledge.

This is hugely important to consider when you’re trying to affect consumer behavior.

Simply following losely accurate consumer data is only minimally helpful.

Generating meaningful hashtag#roi means knowing how to influence, affect, and inspire. You have to lead. And it takes hashtag#experience to see past the seemingly obvious to the real influences.

Which is hard to do if you don't look up from an only slightly valid data feed.