If you are a math guy who loves baseball like I am, you have undoubtedly seen the movie, “Moneyball”.  For those who haven’t seen it, “Moneyball” is about a baseball executive who cannot compete with the big market ballclubs and their obscene player budgets, so he must reassess how to compete under his club’s budgetary constraints.  I’m not spoiling the movie by telling you that he must adopt a set of innovative evaluation metrics to estimate the value of a ballplayer based on their impact to team victories.  He no longer is working according to market value.  He is implementing a data-based valuation system.

I find this amazingly similar to the marketing circulation challenge.  With an unlimited budget and no concerns about effectiveness and efficiency metrics, marketers can spend more and more until they generate the desired revenue.  Growth before productivity. 

The smarter way is “Marketball”.

Moneyball:  Ballclub expects to win on a budget

Marketball:  Company expects to hit its financial targets on a budget

Moneyball:  Performance metric is team wins

Marketball:  Performance metric is company profits

Moneyball:  Within budget, choose the right mix of ballplayers to produce victories

Marketball:  Within budget, make the correct mail decisions to generate financial targets

Moneyball:  The differentiators with competing ballclubs are unique data-based performance metrics.  Rules of thumb and uncorrelated metrics are tossed aside.  Only those
metrics measuring productivity matter.  Team performance rules.

Marketball:  The difference makers are productivity metrics designed to capture incremental performance across the entire set marketing contacts.
I may be stretching the comparison a bit, but not a lot.  Contact optimization, or “Marketball”, is the revolution to marketing that “Moneyball” was to baseball.  Optimize.  Data-based.  Within constraints.  And survive, compete, even flourish.  You can be the Brad Pitt (implementor) of your organization.  I’ll be the Bill James (scientist).

FINISH!

About Randy Erdahl
Randy is an analytic marketing champion and is Clario’s Executive Vice President, Optimization Solutions and co-founder. As the executive leader of optimization solutions, he provides vision and direction for Clario Stream Solution development, as well technical leadership to sales, marketing and direct client interaction.