By Rich Lanza
In Marketing, with thousands or millions of transactions (especially in digital) occurring each year, analysts have an inherent need to select population samples to draw conclusions and make decisions, or do they? Sampling is performed because it often appears impossible to gather data from the entire population, but what if you the analyst could gather 100% of the requisite data for a given business process?
A good point of reference is evidenced in the movie, Imitation Game. The actors were trying to stop a device named Enigma that changed its code every 20 minutes. There were 159 million, million, million possible Enigma settings, and each one needed to be tried. If 10 people checked one setting a minute for 24 hours, every day, how many days do you think it would take to check each of the settings? Well, it’s not days, its years. 20 million years. To stop Enigma, the team would have had to check 20 million years worth of settings in 20 minutes.
It is mathematically impossible to manually test and provide assurance for every marketing transaction or media buy. Understandably, it may seem easier to simply pick a small sample and rely on statistics to extrapolate trends, ROI and error rates. However as analysts, as in the movie, we measure activity and outcomes and we rely on ongoing computerized assistance. In our current age of “Big Data” and advancement of digital and social marketing, too many still rely on antiquated approaches, sampling and manual reviews. It is almost as if we use sampling as a more simplistic means of testing a business process, even if a better solution is staring us right in the face.
That solution is to analyze as much of the business process data with analytics. This methodology can be generally referred to as 100% auditing (or data mining). Data mining allows the analyst to visualize and understand financial accounts. It is not a far stretch to imagine at least half of the current procedures where sampling is applied could be turned into an analytic. Please note that many times a business process may not have computer readable data but isn’t that an issue unto itself?
100% auditing is utilized by AARM in working with large advertisers and their agency partners. When a client engages a 100% sampling methodology to continually monitor marketing expenditures, the investment pays dividends in all future years.
Once established, analytic-enabled testing is completed in seconds and can be scheduled to run on a recurring basis. This is much faster than any sampling approach and, as in the Imitation Game, requires very little human resource requirement. Rather, the analyst can be focused on the exceptions and interpreting of results to help improve the marketing process. At AARM, years ago this systematic capability was developed, and named AArmor AnalyticsTM. Our clients have embraced 100% auditing to monitor efficiency and effectiveness of their vast array of marketing expenditures and the financial practices.
Interested in learning more about the use of AArmor Analytics at your company? Contact Don Parsons, Principal at AARM | Advertising Audit & Risk Management at dparsons@aarmusa.com for more information.