As I have come to learn in my travels around the Ogilvy network, there are an awful lot of smart and interesting people within Ogilvy. And a lot of them are impressive social media thought leaders. While other companies have been shouting about how 'social' they are and even some of those taking pot-shots at the boogeymen "big agencies", Ogilvy has been quite naturally fostering some truly interesting voices around the world.
First in a series of posts and tweets that highlight my new influences (i.e. new influencers), today I am spending time on Dimitri Maex, Managing Director Marketing Effectiveness for Ogilvy based in NYC. I know him as the head Web Analytics guy. He's also the guy that can help Irfan and I take Conversation Impact to a new level (Conversation Impact is our measurement model for social media marketing) but that's a different post.
Dimitri can be found in all the usual places -Facebook, Twitter - and he's got a pretty cool blog he shares with Colin Mitchell, Chief Strategy Officer for Ogilvy in North America called The Double Think.
The Double Think
Dimitri and Colin co-author the blog offering a split-screen approach to analysis and planning. I actually don't know which posts to attribute to either one although common sense would suggest that the ones on the left are Dimitri's and those on the right are Colin's. If I have that wrong, my apologies.
I love their posts on measurement and visualizations.
In a recent post on the History of Scientific Marketing, they cover the evolution of the use of mathemateics in marketing from the early years of direct response to the present. Thorough and almost academic, Dimitri reveals his passion for his subject. This is clearest when he gets to the present era - the Fourth Era: Digital Effectiveness. Here's a slice of that passion:
"E-commerce environments provide us with a closed-loop system, which in marketing effectiveness terms gets us close to nirvana. Digital media data can show us exactly which media individuals have been exposed to. Website data can show us where individuals came from (or, in the case of search, what terms they typed in to arrive at a site). We can then observe these individuals’ entire shopping behavior, all the way to their actual conversion to a sale. With more and more media becoming digital, we could easily imagine a scenario where most, if not all, media exposures can be traced to an individual sale."
Clearly he is talking about an ideal that remains difficult to realize. But I sense that Dimitri and his team are close to pulling this off ona routine basis.
As for visualizations, they tend to unearth some interesting tools and research like the post On the Death of Fads. At it's heart is a Wharton/Stanford paper on the trajectroy of children's names - how long they remain "in" or how quickly they pass out of favor.
Follow Dimitri (and Colin), they are part of a expanding group of thoughtleaders thinking (and doing) about the intersection of marketing, communications, social media and how we are all changing.
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Posted by: College Research Papers | February 22, 2010 at 01:31 AM