The chart you should never see on a dashboard

This chart communicates two data series pretty well. It's not cluttered and it's definitely not a pie chart.

Unfortunately, it's also an almost guaranteed sign of a dashboard that's looking for a purpose and that hasn't been designed with a task in mind. A dashboard that won't help you.

Dashboards are for monitoring data that you already understand. Data, which you very likely already know how you'll react to when it changes. This chart is for analysis - it compares data, looking for a relationship.

Take the term 'dashboard' literally for a minute and think about the data that's displayed on the dashboard in your car. Your speed is shown on there, because you need to know it and because you already know how to make it change when it's too fast or too slow.

You have a petrol gauge too. That's useful data to avoid an embarrassing call to the AA from the hard shoulder because you've run out of petrol. Again, when the gauge drops, you already know what to do.

A lot of data about your car isn't on the dashboard. There's no report on the mix of gasses coming out of your exhaust for example.That's useful information to know whether your engine is running efficiently, so why isn't it there?

It's not there, because if it's out of line, what are you going to do about it? If you're like me, then you probably don't even know what out of line might look like. It would be a distraction from driving at best. There might well be a warning light on the dashboard that says 'see a mechanic' when the exhaust gasses aren't right but that's a very different concept to showing you all of the data and hoping that you draw the right conclusions.

Back to the chart then. It's a classic sign of a dashboard that's trying to be used for analysis, rather than for keeping an eye on indicators that you understand. We had a client recently ask for a chart of their sales vs. the weather and it's very much that kind of chart. The client didn't really want a chart of their sales vs. the weather; they wanted to know if their sales were affected by the weather and they thought that the chart might tell them.

It wouldn't.

You need a mechanic for that. In marketing, we call mechanics analysts.

Dashboarding large amounts of data that you don't already understand in detail, won't help to improve your marketing. It will distract you from driving.

Monitoring a lot of statistics and hoping to spot relationships between them won't work. You need to be a mechanic, or at least to want to learn to be one.

Dashboards are for metrics that you understand. That you already know how to respond to. Everything else is analysis and it doesn't belong on your dashboard.

Effective data visualisation for marketers

This is a little pack I put together for the planners here at Brilliant and I'm hoping a few others out in marketing land might find it useful too...

Effective data visualisation for marketers

View more presentations from Data_monkey.

I wrote the deck a few months ago and have lost the links to a few sources. If you recognise the number 5's screenshot or the chart forms graphic, thanks - it was a great article. Please let me know as I'd like to credit them properly.

There are bad charts...

And then there's this one, which I've just been sent this morning. It was titled "The rise of social networks"




I've removed the creator's logo and a footnote that said "Source: UKOM April 2010", but other than that it's unmolested. I don't even know where to start with what's wrong with it. Anybody got an emergency copy of Tufte?

Too clever by half... how to over-complicate your marketing.

When I was working at EMI, a hot topic was the single pre-release window and whether it works. Sony and Universal have recently decided that it doesn't.

Pre-release involves letting radio stations have a single before it actually goes on sale. In marketing terms it sounds like madness - you play radio listeners your track for a fortnight, giving them time to get interested in it, record it, pirate it and potentially even get tired of it before you ever try to sell them a copy.

There is (or was) a logic to pre-release. Chart position is (was) an incredibly strong form of marketing that leads in turn to more radio airplay, so you build up as much interest as possible over the pre-release period and trigger it all in a single week. Then you cross your fingers for a number one hit and a snowball effect as that chart position leads to more and more airplay and an extended chart run.

My gratuitious bracket use is a hint to the problem with this strategy. Twenty years ago it was probably quite sensible - if a little too clever for its own good - but fast forward to 2011 and it's a disaster.

• Regardless of whether the label says a single is on sale or not, if the album's out then you can buy the track on iTunes. Do you really want the b-side that much? Come to that, what's a b-side in 2011?
  
  In 2011, you've just got a strategy that makes a mess of your marketing timing between iTunes and Radio.
  
  
• If you play people music they like and tell them they can't have it, what do you think they're going to do? Wait patiently for two weeks and then rush to HMV, or pirate it right now? No prizes for the right answer, it's too easy.
  

It's unbelievable that inertia in the music business has meant that it's taken this long to change strategy.

At least that one was probably a sensible strategy once. I was reminded of it this morning by the news that Heinz are going to pre-release a ketchup flavour on Facebook.

Why on earth would you do that?

Apparently they expect the 3000 bottle run to sell out in days and it probably will, but then what have you achieved?

Let's assume a best case. Facebook is a well targeted advertising channel for the housewives (that's media targeting housewives - they don't have to be women) who are typically responsible for ketchup shopping. Yeah, right, but moving swiftly on...

You generate loads of interest in the page and shift your 3000 bottles in less than 24 hours. We're obviously pretending here that most of the PR coverage isn't going to be the marketing industry taking to itself.

You've got 3000 happy Facebookers and lots more who couldn't try your tasty new condiment but really, really want to.

Now they've got a few weeks to forget all about ketchup before they visit Sainsbury's. Perfect.


As a strategy, it's over-complicated and inefficient. Pre-release music was an example of an industry obsessed with the music charts assuming that everybody else was still obsessed with them too.

Ketchup on Facebook sounds like an ad industry that is obsessed with Facebook assuming that everybody else is just as obsessed as them and will want to buy everything there.