…if the quantity of information is increasing by 2.5 quintillion bytes per day, the amount of useful information almost certainly isn’t. Most of it is just noise, and the noise is increasing faster than the signal. There are so many hypotheses to test, so many data sets to mine—but a relatively constant amount of objective truth.
–Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise
I recently had the pleasure of returning to the lovely Harbourfront district of Toronto to attend and speak at Book Summit Canada 2014. I did two sessions, one called “Big Ideas from Big (or Small) Data” and one a follow-up to a session I did last year called “By the Numbers.” Many attendees asked that I share the slides that accompanied the talks, particularly the first, with which I really had a lot of fun.
I am an admirer (read “fan”) of Nate Silver and his process of collecting, analyzing, synthesizing, and articulating data. In fact, I do my damnedest to emulate it, though my stats chops fall far short of his, I’m afraid. I wanted to do something fun with the presentation and so found myself wondering if one should try and, if so, how to outsize the sales of Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise in Canada. So, I took that as a hypothetical marketing case. I had fun. I hope you enjoy the slides.
Big Ideas from Big (or Small) Data from The Logical Marketing Agency
These are the first presentations I gave in my new role as Co-founder of The Logical Marketing Agency and so are presented under the LMA banner. If you’re curious about the agency, you can head over to www.logical-marketing.com.
