It's never been about the data

A lot of people are getting very excited about data again. Journalists particularly, seem to think they've spotted a new source of stories and are jumping on the 'Data Journalism' bandwagon.

The latest article to drop onto my Twitter feed - and the one that's prompted this post - is 'Data is the new black', accompanied by the now obligatory infographic that's not an infographic.

This latest surge of interest in (Big) Data is slightly different to the ones we've seen before. In the past, we've heard huge promises for what data analysis could deliver and then very often, nothing at all was delivered. To pick one example from the marketing world, 'Project Apollo' was rather expensive and never really made much progress. Data analysis projects often bogged down in the data assembly phase (they still do), without managers ever seeing much beyond PowerPoint decks that prophesied the arrival of data nirvana. Data nirvana being permanently around six months away, once we've sorted out a few teething problems. And could we have £40k for another database analyst to fix those teething problems please.

This time around, data is delivering some output. Recently, The Guardian had a very pretty interactive illustration of poverty rankings across UK regions, that would have been hard for a newspaper to put together even a couple of years ago. Tools like Google Fusion Tables and Tableau are making that data assembly phase more accessible and quicker to throw output at an audience. It looks like we might be getting somewhere.

The Guardian's work is showing exactly where we're getting though and it's not quite the brave new world that some have promised. When you complete a major piece of analysis, you very often prove the answer that you were expecting in the first place. This isn't just true of social science, it works for classical scientific research too.

Think about what a scientist does, away from the media spotlight of a genuine breakthrough:
Is this a cure for the common cold? No. Is this? No. What about this? No. This one? Still no. It's not that we should stop looking but you can be 99% sure what the answer's going to be before you start.

The same happens with social science data like economic statistics and population demographics. When you examine them, largely, you prove what you already suspect. The Guardian's proved that the North of England is more deprived that the South. We knew that.

Examples of genuine revelations from marketing databases are hard to find and those that do surface are often dubious. The legendary nappies and beer example (diapers and beer if you're American) states that database analysts working for a major retailer noticed nappies and beer were often sold together. The story goes that young male parents often buy nappies on a Friday night and pick up a pack of beer at the same time, so cross marketing these two products is extremely effective. Take your pick on which retailer came up with it - Wal-mart, Tesco, ASDA - it's not actually true.

What data does let you do is to make a case more strongly. Data analysis helps us to move the foundations of a discussion from opinion, to fact, so that the discussion can move on to what we do about those facts. In marketing, if there's a widely held suspicion that a piece of advertising doesn't work, then it almost certainly doesn't, but very often it's not until you prove it, that the offending campaign will finally be pruned from the schedule.

It's never been about the data; it's about the question. Data can provide a stronger answer to a question than opinion alone and so if you ask the right questions, it will help to make a stronger argument. What it will never do is proffer insights of its own accord and it will rarely shock you in its conclusions. Those looking for epiphanies from analysis of Big Data, are likely to be disappointed.

We need to talk about infographics

I blame Wordle. It's not fair to blame Wordle, but marketing's obsession with infographics got well out of hand at some point and I think it was around the same time that pretty word clouds came within reach of every bored account manager with a slide to fill.

I actually like Wordle a lot, so on second thoughts, maybe we should blame the infographic's leap to fame on marketing's discovery of Wordle rather than the tool itself, which has been around since 2008. A quick check of Insights for Search shows that the world went infographic mad a bit later than that, starting in 2009-2010.

Google searches for "infographic"

That growth line really isn't slowing down is it?

In case you hadn't guessed yet, this post is developing into a rant about infographics. To be more precise, infographics as they are used in marketing. I'm a little concerned though, that I may have just used an infographic to illustrate my point. Except that I'm pretty sure that's not what the image above is. It's a chart. If you're being pretentious, it's a data visualisation.

Data visualisations have a purpose; they exist to communicate data more effectively than text could. But could they still be the same thing as infographics? Maybe infographic is just short-hand for data visualisation?

Here's what Wikipedia thinks an infographic is...

"Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics present complex information quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education. With an information graphic, computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians develop and communicate concepts using a single symbol to process information."

I really like the idea of the infographic as a sign. It differentiates it from a data visualisation and gives it a purpose. You could list all of the exits on this roundabout, with a paragraph for each that describes where they go, but you'd cause an accident as people tried, at 40mph, to read what you'd written. Infographics - by the Wikipedia definition - are useful to communicate a lot of information at a glance.

Let's be honest though, marketing infographics don't often look like that road sign. In marketing and journalism at least, the Wikipedia entry is out of date and the infographics we see today are a very long way from doing that job.

Let's pick on the IAB. That's not really a fair thing to do either, but they've been known to publish infographics and yesterday, they published this one.

Now that's a marketing infographic! Much more like it. Lots of charts all blended together into one big image and pretty typical of what you can see shared far and wide on Twitter every day.

It's quite pretty.

Probably took quite some time to draw.

My question is why draw it? Other than being link-bait for all those Google searches, what is an image like this for? Maybe it's art? Then it wouldn't need to be for anything, but I don't think it's art.

It needs a purpose, but I can't work out what its purpose is. For the time it takes to make one of these, it needs to be better at communicating than writing a short article and illustrating it with charts, but it just isn't. Infographics like this let you throw unstructured data at your audience (in a pretty format) in the hope that they'll draw some insights of their own from it. You're hoping that your audience will do the analysis for you.

In all honesty, I think this is what's been responsible for the infographic explosion. Facts are easy to get your hands on. They're everywhere. Original insight and analysis is hard and that makes the infographic perfect blog fodder. Take any topical subject, plus a bit of Googling for some relevant numbers, plus a few hours in Adobe Illustrator and you've got yourself some high grade link-bait.

Contrast the infographic above, with this lovely piece of data visualisation from The Guardian.

The Guardian's work makes a vast number of tweets more comprehensible than they would have been if you'd just thrown raw data about them at the viewer. The infographic on the other hand, throws large amounts of almost-raw data at the viewer.

Comparing between these two is undoubtedly unfair, as one is the product of a hell of a lot more work, but what's important for me is the scope of what they're trying to achieve. Only one attempts to aid your understanding of a subject. And only that one is worth your time and effort to decipher.

Feedback on this article from The Register, which recently started dabbling in infographics (the modern 'throw a lot of data at the page and see what sticks' versions) make me think that I'm not alone, but maybe you like the current direction? Have you seen any marketing infographics that you still find useful and refer back to? That did a better job than simply writing an article would have? I'd love to hear about them. Somebody's generating all those Google searches too, so if you're a sucker for an infographic, what is it about them that's so appealing?

Right now, the word infographic to me means "presenting data in a pretty format that makes it difficult to use" and until they go back to following that Wikipedia definition, I'll be steering well clear.