Website traffic metrics. Social media engagement statistics. Marketing performance analytics. These are some of the most popular terms in marketing today, and they reflect the much larger trend of businesses increasingly relying on big data analytics.The numbers can be a bit daunting, but the concept is simple: Businesses with the capability to sort through the mountain of information at their disposal (a mountain growing larger every day thanks to our increasingly digital world) and glean important insights about how they operate can improve operations based on those insights. These organizations can boost efficiency and productivity and ultimately gain an advantage over competitors.
But where did this trend originate? How did data analytics grab hold of the marketing and business worlds so quickly? Although those questions can be tackled several different ways, at least part of the answer is a man named Bill James.
If you have never heard this name you are certainly not alone. In fact, although he is arguably the most influential figure in baseball over the past 15 years, even some of the sport’s biggest fans don’t know who he is (although that number has decreased considerably over time). But if you use any kind of analytics as part of your job, you have a connection to Bill James.
For years, James worked as a security guard in Kansas. He had always been good with numbers and he loved baseball. So he began to keep and analyze statistics that nobody else was using; in many cases, he was taking raw numbers and turning them into statistical categories that didn’t even exist previously.
He wrote a book titled “1977 Baseball Abstract: Featuring 18 Categories of Statistical Information You Can’t Find Anywhere Else.” The book sold 75 copies, enough to spur James to write another edition in 1978. Over time, baseball fans and media outlets looking for new statistics became loyal readers. Still, up until 2003, James was a complete unknown both inside and outside of baseball. But that year, best-selling author Michael Lewis published a book called “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” and everything changed.
“Moneyball” focused on Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and the innovative way he was evaluating players. Rather than using statistics that had been institutionally ingrained in baseball for 100 years (e.g. batting average), Beane was using advanced metrics to evaluate his players. The A’s could only afford a payroll a fraction the size of big-market teams like the Yankees, so Beane came to believe that the only way he could compete with these behemoth franchises was to find small advantages in places nobody else was looking. And he looked for those advantages in Beane’s statistical work.
From the time he decided to adopt this strategy, Beane began making personnel moves that caused baseball minds both inside and outside of his own organization to question his sanity. For years after Lewis’ book was published, longtime baseball writers, fans, scouts and players were dismissive of Beane’s approach. It seemed an affront to the sport’s dogma and an insult to those who believed they knew the game expertly. But over time, a funny thing happened; the A’s starting winning—a lot.
In fact, the A’s got more wins out of the money they spent on players than any other team in baseball by a wide margin. “Moneyball” sold millions of copies and was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. As the “Godfather” of the statistical analysis that drove much of the A’s success, James gained some a small measure of fame, particularly to hardcore baseball fans.
Slowly but surely, “Moneyball” began to find its way into corporate board rooms as well. If a baseball team could gain this kind of advantage using advanced statistical analysis, why couldn’t businesses do the same? As it turned out, they could. More than a decade after it was first published many businesses require their employees to read the book and even CEOs use “Moneyball” strategy to make decisions.
Marketing departments have been impacted by James, as have numerous other business divisions. In many organizations, analytics and metrics are a significant part of numerous content marketing decisions, from what time of day to post a blog to how long an e-mail marketing message should be.
These insights are certainly critical for marketers and those who are not using any analytics tools should seriously consider changing that immediately. But there is another valuable lesson to be learned from the tale of Bill James: Don’t ever write off an idea or an approach to a project without investigating it first.
You never know what you might be missing.
