5.18.17 — This week’s #TBT is titled, “CMO Or SCHMO? Clinging To Old Marketing Models May Be Hurting Rather Than Helping Drive Growth.” I posted this on Forbes.com on 12/19/16. The article is timely in light of several recent developments: Coke’s decision to eliminate the CMO position, lawsuits filed against Google and and Facebook over phony metrics or fraudulent clicks, and the announced decreases in ad budgets by P&G and Unilever.

I detailed in the article how the Coke CMO told a conference that his firm received a return on every dollar spent of $1.26 for digital and $2.13 for TV. I questioned these figures, and now I question whether he should have made the presentation to the CEO of Coke and their board to save his position. Perhaps he did and they weren’t buying those metrics either.

I end with the advice for marketers to move beyond old measurements and models, steer clear of theoretical attribution models and focus on real consumer analytics. Hopefully this message is getting though to some.

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Today’s Throwback Thursday article “Big Data And The Madness Of Crowds” was written for Forbes.com on 6/17/2014. The context deals with the madness of crowds, which was the topic of a book written by Charles Mackay in 1841. Mackay wrote of the crowd psychology that drives numerous “national delusions.” Among the various manias were the tulip bubble of the 17th century, witch mania of the 16th and 17th centuries, and alchemists who sought to turn base metals to gold.

The problem with crowd psychology is that it created an emotional feedback loop, whereby dissent is often stifled by the crowd. This article counseled about not becoming victim of big data mania and its magic wand solutions. The reader was advised that “the value of big data is in analytics that are specifically designed for your business.” Isn’t that where we are today?

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March 30, 2017: Today’s Throwback Thursday article is “David Vs. Goliath: Why Little Data Will Win Over Big Data” from my Forbes.com column on May 29, 2014. The issues discussed concerning big data are now apparent today. In the Internet data scraping world, numerous marketers are now disillusioned by the hype about the quintillions of unstructured big data bits filled with bot fraud, unverifiable assumptions, unknowable demographic representations, and privacy issues. Forget the size of the data and focus first on the business issues/challenges cautions the article. Second, seek out the relevant data to better understand the business issues/challenges. Finally, apply advanced analytic processes to the relevant data to empower executives to make better evidence-based decisions to manage challenges.

Click here to read the article.