ST Dat

4/21/2016
Home
BY
Storytelling and data: when beautiful metrics can't beat words - Chief Marketing Technologist
Archives
About
Published
Speaking
SCOTT BRINKER
APRIL 13, 2016
Storytellinganddata:whenbeautifulmetricscantbeat
words
LIKE THIS? PLEASE SHARE
0
Tweet
Share
HACKING MARKETING SCOTTS NEW BOOK
The following is a guest post by Sergio Maldonado, founder and CEO of Sweetspot Intelligence.
Family storytelling die-hards may have heard of Bill Gordh, an award-winning, banjo-playing
storyteller that has performed with the New York Philharmonic as well as at the White House
Easter Egg Roll. He has also traveled extensively around the world.
I had the opportunity to attend one of Bills storytelling workshops a few weeks ago. Although
he did not go into dissecting the speci c tricks of his art, a few things called my attention:
He turned a very basic script into an exciting adventure, peppering a rhythmic journey
with various amusing stopovers that granted engagement. Then he rounded it up by
making a dramatic scene out of a simple ending.
He ensured consistency through repeated structural elements across his storys timeline.
This allowed children to easily follow and participate in a few guessing games.
He added images to reinforce key episodes in his story.
When the workshop was over (and we proudly walked away with our own visual storyboard), I
started thinking about all the misconceptions that now exist around storytelling in the
marketing technology space.
Are we really using storytelling techniques in our regular exchange of data-driven insights? Can
data visualization amount to storytelling, in itself? What are the missing pieces, if not?
Heres a quick analysis of the very concept of storytelling as it applies to marketing and
business in general, followed by a few thoughts on how to make the most of it in a data-rich
environment.
SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS OR EMAIL
Subscribe in a reader
Or want to receive new articles via email?
ENTER YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HERE
SUBSCRIBE
Delivered by FeedBurner
Storytelling,deconstructed
le:///Users/neel/Pictures/Storytelling%20and%20data_%20when%20beautiful%20metrics%20can't%20beat%20words%20-%20Chief%20Marketing%20Technologis 1/8
4/21/2016
Combining multiple alternative de nitions into one, I would put this forward: Storytelling is the
TALK WITH US ON TWITTER
act of communicating ideas through the use of narrative elements with the purpose of
educating, entertaining or in uencing others.
Tweets by @chiefmartec
A few key elements, therefore:
LIKE US ON FACEBOOK
Communicating: With the yet unanswered question as to whether human language has to
be present at all, in oral or any other form. More on this in a few paragraphs.
Ideas and purpose: These two come closely intertwined. Although a sequence of events
may amount to a story, it is the underlying ideas that allow us to achieve our purpose in
CATEGORIES OF POSTS
Agencies
Agile Marketing
telling it.
Interviews
Narrative elements: Ideas alone are not stories. They must be tied to events or facts,
which are put into narrative format to ensure emotional impact and future recollection.
Marketing Management
An easy way to see these elements evolving and joining forces is to look back at the history of
storytelling, as many of the ancient cultures we have come across left evidence of its usage as
a means to transfer knowledge, explain the unknown or project authority.
The documentation of storytelling in our modern, business context can be traced back to Dale
Carnegies theories on public speaking. Mr. Carnegie argued that stories are key to make ideas
clear, interesting and persuasive. He also covered various techniques to succeed with real-life
illustrations, including the focus on details and the use of words that allowed the audience to
visualize pictures (such as proper nouns or gures, as opposed to abstract concepts).
Marketing Data
Marketing Software
Marketing Tactics
Other
FAVORITE POSTS
Marketing technology landscape (2016)

What will happen with marketing
technology in 2015?
What if 1,000+ marketing technology
vendors were the new normal?
This can easily be connected with the thoughts of Stanford Universitys Jennifer Aaker in our
current times: we extract meaning from the personal connection we make with stories, and
Strategy, marketing, and technology are all

intertwined
this connection brings about an emotional side of decision-making that, we now know,
precedes logic.
The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the

Marketing Matrix
Storytelling techniques have abounded in multiple areas of business management. From David
Ogilvys ads to Steve Jobs pitches, many well-known business leaders have successfully
leveraged them. More traditional purposes have simply been replaced (disguised?) by our
everyday business needs: selling, building strong teams, de ning brands or acting on data.
Together with these new purposes, the means by which storytelling can be delivered have also
su ered their own evolution in the new, digital, context of business. It remains to be seen,
however, whether we will eventually be able to nd a clear break between form and function.
Formvs.function
Revisiting the rst and last points in our de nition of storytelling (communication, narrative): Is
human language required? Is there storytelling beyond oral expression? Do podcasts and video
qualify? Where do images, symbols and metrics t?
Lets try to answer these questions:
14 rules for data-driven marketing

Agile marketing for a world of change
The big data bubble in marketing
10 key principles of agile marketing
Everything is marketing, everyone must be
agile
Mktg tech: suite, platform, portfolio
Engineers are becoming marketers
Marketing software will never be ERP
Marketers should learn to program
7 laws of technology for marketers
5 strategies for business, life, and really
hard math problems
8 things every marketing technologist
should know
Marketers are the software they use
a) Narrative as a basic requirement of form
Data as a new marketing channel
Narrative, as a representation of connected events, is perhaps the most crucial form factor in
storytelling. Albeit it does not require words (think of a comic strip without dialogue), narrative
does demand a sense of progress over time: events are placed along an imaginary timeline,
Rise of the marketing technologist
even though ashbacks and parallel sequences may be at play.

Arguably, elements of consistency should also be present in narrative. These elements keep
events tightly connected to each other regardless of the manner in which chronology is used.
Though, of course, these elements are more tied to semantics than structure and, as a result,
dependent on language, our next item.
b) Human language
One of the rst books I happily bought in my early twenties was a bilingual (English-Spanish)
copy of Anna Livia Plurabelle, the most widely discussed chapter in James Joyces last book,
Finnegans Wake.
I was absolutely fascinated by the mere idea of the author making up his own language
4/21/2016
through conceptual shortcuts, and even borrowing terms from ve or more languages as he
saw t to best express a given thought (which makes for a rather hopeless translation). I
wondered:
Could human language become akin to object-oriented programming? Could we start adding
levels of abstraction until the evolution of our species morphed our heads to look like those of
the martians in our comic books?
Joyces original idea was simple, but extremely powerful: language determines the limits of our
thoughts, and it is only through a richer representation of ideas/concepts that we can boost
our own understanding of every experience.
Thousands of essays had been written before on the nature of language from multiple angles.
While Kant considered it the ultimate representation of thought, Russeau called it an
instinctive expression of emotions. In most recent times, Wittgenstein has defended the
theory that language shapes our experience of the world. An approach that could be easily
connected with Joyces: the limits of your language are the limits of your world.
Our very culture or experiences are re ected in the manner in which we employ or process
words. While metrics and their various representations can be culture-neutral (and never
entirely: take colors!), words are undeniably partial.
When we hear the word subtle we do not expect violent turns. When the word problem
appears in a phrase, our brains prepare for impact. So even prior to dealing with elements of
narrative, How then can the choice of words not prove essential to obtain a desired e ect?
In other words (paradoxically enough), human language is not just form, but also function,
when it comes to appealing to the emotions of others. Which in turn makes language itself
unavoidable if storytelling is meant to have and emotional and memorable impact.
c) The language of images
If language is a combination of words and symbols (as these may simply represent such words
or the letters they are made of), Where do images belong? Do they not share the same roots?
After all, symbols, as a representation of reality were all we had before language even existed.
We could argue that many symbols would qualify as images as long as they remain visual
representations of something (take hieroglyphs). But just as many symbols remain dissociated
from real objects, images can easily fall short of becoming a symbol -e.g. by representing
someone in merely descriptive terms.
As human beings, our ability to create images preceded written text by 32,000 years (records of
the latter will only take us 8,000 years back), so it would make sense to accept that images
played the role of written language while speci c words were slowly being codi ed. Which in
turn would separate our ability to understand the world around us from our capacity to
asynchronously -not being present- communicate such understanding.
This denial of an objective understanding in the absence of words, coupled with a denial of
images as a direct shortcut to the meaning of objects or scenes being represented is fully
consistent with our everyday experiences. Su ce to quote digital analytics guru Avinash
Kaushik in relation to using stock photos when presenting data insights: Photos are very
personal. We bring our biases, our life experience [ ]. You lose control of the story.
But surely we cannot abandon our faith in images. After all, they are worth a thousand words,
or so we often repeat without much questioning. Do we refer to its ability to communicate
while being presented? Are we talking about our ability to remember instead? How about its
potential to educate, entertain or drive action?
I was very happy to come across a study that nally dared to explore this assertion further. In
Reduction and elimination of format e ects on recall, Paul W. Foos and Paula Goolkasian
focused solely on memory and concluded that an image was in fact worth 1.5 printed words
(and little more than a single spoken word).
This is all very interesting, but we would still need to draw the line between images replacing
language (photographs, conceptual or descriptive drawings) and images representing
4/21/2016
numbers. Do we process metrics (and their graphical representation) di erently or do we

transform them into words/language?
d) The language of numbers
Number sense is the term regularly used to describe the intuitive understanding of numbers
by human beings. This entails our ability to count, but also any other animals ability to
perceive changes in a number of things in a collection.
But back to our question: Do we process numbers independently from language?
Only to a very limited extent. As some studies show, it is through language that we are able to
link up our small, exact number abilities (naturally being able to count up to three) with our
large, approximate number abilities (naturally being able to understand that we have many
things). In other words, mathematics requires abstraction, and abstraction is built on language
and symbolic representation -a numeric system.
This is even supported by archeological evidence that language predates numeracy. Not to
mention the many illustrations of language in uencing mathematical ability.
So we must accept a close relationship between human language and mathematics, but, as
discussed earlier, numbers and their symbols are actually language-neutral. And insofar as
they allow us to build a substitution layer that is common to multiple languages, they provide a
means of record and communication that is dissociated from human language and the
empathy that comes with it.
Jennifer Aakers thoughts come very handy once again. Speaking at the 2013 Future of
Storytelling Summit, the social psychologist explained (and illustrated with data) that stories
are memorable, impactful, and personal in a way that statistics are not.
e) Audio and video
Recent decades have taken recorded human language beyond text and images, to audio les
and video recordings. Digitalization has made both of them widely available to anybody with as
little as a mobile phone. Neither podcasts nor video les have not stopped growing in
popularity in the business context.
On the basis of the previously mentioned Foos and Goolkasian study, a podcast would have a
stronger impact than written text, if only in terms of our ability to remember the underlying
message.
Video format can take this even further, allowing us to support such recorded speech with
visual elements, while avoiding a lack of control in the manner in which message and
visualization are processed together. In other words, video provides a synchronous illustration
of recorded speech that becomes the closest thing to oral communication. As a disadvantage,
however, all supporting elements of the story would have to be embedded within the video,
conforming a self-contained piece instead of an e ective complement to other environments
where, for instance, data becomes the primary context.
Storytellingmeetsdata
In summary, data visualizations cannot amount to storytelling. Void of language, they are
unable to independently transmit ideas, clear purpose and emotional impact.
The very concept of data storytelling seems to me rather far-fetched as a result.
This said, as business management is increasingly more data-driven, metrics are indeed
becoming a crucial part of any story. After all, data visualizations do provide excellent support
when metrics are part of the story.
This said, as business management is increasingly more data-driven, metrics are indeed
becoming a crucial part of any story. We could ask ourselves, however, on a case-by-case basis:
1. Is the data shown at the heart of the ideas we aim to communicate?
2. Is having an impact on the metrics being represented the purpose of the story?
Storytelling is often put at the service of entertainment or coverage of current events when
4/21/2016
none of these conditions (ideas and purpose, as per our prior de nition) is met, with data
playing the role of providing additional context or back-up information. Multiple examples of
this can be found in the media. As such, supporting data visualizations will range from static
point-in-time charts to open, reader-driven visual discovery widgets (providing a tool for the
audience to retrieve valuable related information).
If only the rst condition is met, storytelling will be at the service of information delivery (an
equally legitimate scenario in data-driven management) or the exercise of in uence, having an
impact on other business metrics not directly related to those on display -e.g. higher-level
objectives in the organization.
If, however, both conditions are met, storytelling will have been put at the service of data
actionability. The impact of human language is in this case required to provoke a measurable
reaction on the part of internal stakeholders in the face of a particular set of metrics. A
combination of author-driven data visualizations, language and images will be at play in this
case.
This (action-driven storytelling) could happen as a stand-alone e ort or as part of prede ned
process. The rst one can be as simple as an infographic (combining words, symbols, images
and numbers in a logical arrangement that favors sequence). The second would be best
understood in the context of Insight Management methodologies.
Under the original Digital Insight Management principles laid out by Eric T. Peterson in 2012 (in
a paper sponsored by Sweetspot), digital analysts are provided with a means to accompany
their insights with recommended actions (a bottom-up insight delivery process). Once acted
upon (by decision-making data consumers), the impact of those actions is recorded along the
timeline provided for each KPI.
This data-driven optimization work ow was soon followed by an alternative top-down
approach to insight management (a agging system), built on the premise that an e ective
distribution of metrics results in management being in the best possible position to
dynamically de ne the priorities of the analysts job.
But there still was room for improvement. As businesses demand open, interoperable
ecosystems, Insight Management had to become a natural part of existing enterprise
collaborative and generic work ow environments. Furthermore, together with KPI updates,
insights had to become ubiquitous, permeating other layers of internal communication or
information delivery. And this had to happen in a way that supported author-driven narrative
features.
This led to what we now call Integrated Insight Management, bringing about a new perspective
of storytelling that is focused on performance, with words and narrative put at the service of
data actionability.
4/21/2016
Machinelearning,automationandscalability
An elementary axiom supports all three insight management approaches (bottom-up, topdown, integrated): data analytics cannot happen without the intervention of data analysts or
data scientists, no matter how sophisticated our tools or how clean our data.
Palantirs Peter Thiel has supported this assertion better than anyone else in Zero to One
(2014):
We have let ourselves become enchanted by big data only because we exotize
technology. Were impressed with small feats accomplished by computers alone,
but we ignore big achievements from complementarity because the human
contribution makes them less uncanny.
But we are never free of hype and fads (the new wave of storytelling has a lot to thank them
for too), and so we are now faced with the collective illusion of self-service business
intelligence, on the basis that data consumers business stakeholders can themselves be
empowered with unlimited data exploration and forecasting capabilities across a myriad of
structured, unstructured and semi-structured data sources, regardless of how incompatible or
poor the various data models or data sets involved may be.
4/21/2016
Besides a large amount of limitations (technical, performance-related and data governancerelated), these attempts relegate storytelling and insight management to ad hoc reports and
meetings aimed to obtain buy-in for a given action. In other words, they deprive organizations
of the progress already made in connecting the dots between performance management, data
governance and insight actionability.
But not all are bad news when it comes to automation and machine learning: a repeated
datainsightactionmeasurement process against a common set of metrics in a welldelimited business domain will result in a valuable repository of the best potential courses of
action when faced with future challenges.
And there is much more within reach today:
Automated generation of textual summaries of current performance against goals or past
periods by combining the what that regular KPI updates embody with the why that
their most closely associated dimensional breakdown represents.
Text analytics to predict the potential impact of a given set of words.
Automated reshu e and update of pre-built infographic modules to shape stories that
drive action.
It is certainly time to bring some of these together with our current storytelling and insight
management capabilities.
Finalthoughts
The division of roles in the marketing data space (analyst-data consumer-other stakeholders) is
unstoppable, no matter how powerful our algorithms and grandiloquent our defense of selfservice BI.
This plurality results in many data analysts and even more data consumers quickly becoming
data ambassadors and information delivery experts in need of communication tools that
ensure the impact of metrics (and their insights) on the broader organization, starting with the
unmatched power of words.
Storytelling takes these words one step beyond, provoking emotional connections that drive
action. I strongly believe that insight management methodologies provide the best possible
grounds today for this powerful tool to thrive.
Data integration and analysis endeavors have already taken irrational amounts of budget and
time for the little real impact they have had on the large organization. I believe it is time to put
a fraction of such investments on the e ective delivery of metrics and data insights. And I
suspect this people-focused layer holds the answer to justifying every other prior e ort.
Thank you, Sergio! For those of you who would like to read more about this topic, Sweetspot
Intelligence o ers a white paper that combines in-depth coverage of these and other points
with case studies and product screenshots, available here: The Marketers Path to Data-driven
Storytelling and Actionable Insights.
0
Tweet
Share
FILED UNDER: MARKETING DATA

PREVIOUS POST
The buzz around account-based

marketing at MarTech
LeaveaReply
4/21/2016
Enteryourcommenthere...
RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
COPYRIGHT 2008-2016 SCOTT BRINKER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

ST Dat

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

ST Dat

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

4/21/2016

APRIL 13, 2016

LIKE THIS? PLEASE SHARE

HACKING MARKETING SCOTTS NEW BOOK

SUBSCRIBE VIA RSS OR EMAIL

TALK WITH US ON TWITTER

A few key elements, therefore:

Marketing technology landscape (2016)

Strategy, marketing, and technology are all

The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the

14 rules for data-driven marketing

a) Narrative as a basic requirement of form

Data as a new marketing channel

Rise of the marketing technologist

even though ashbacks and parallel sequences may be at play.

numbers. Do we process metrics (and their graphical representation) di erently or do we

FILED UNDER: MARKETING DATA

The buzz around account-based

RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE

COPYRIGHT 2008-2016 SCOTT BRINKER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

You might also like