When you look up and you see that it’s a hit and that you’re going to get paid off, it’s a tingling from my toes on up to the top of my head that comes into my body. That’s what makes me want to put more money into the machines. 

-From HBS Case, "Harrah's Entertainment Inc." More >>

It is somewhat common knowledge today that “Analysts,” those who master the numbers and formulas that fuel our information economy, do quite well for themselves. Lots of people want to talk about statistics, analytics, data mining, predictive modeling, etc., however, there are still relatively few companies that engage in serious analytics and relatively few people, who do this type of work. As such, we analytically oriented folks still end up being generally classified as "geeks." I personally love the term and aspire to be the biggest, baddest, and best analyst geek at my company.

While I may enjoy being a bit of an analyst geek, I am acutely aware of the fact that the title "Analyst" is distinctly not the title "Manager," and therefore analysts are often slotted into non-management functional roles with great starting salaries, but questionable pathways for advancement to the very top of the organization. My very important and fundamental question at this point in my career is, “Do I really want to brand myself as an “Analyst” or as something else? “Digital Marketing Manager” roles off the tongue nicely for instance! More >>

Long before the privacy debate erupted in its current form, Google has had a fairly simple straight forward tool called Ad Preferences Manager, which allows users to adjust the types of ads that Google serves them by changing the preferences stored in Google's tracking cookie. Unfortunately, most people have no clue what the Ad Preferences Manager is or what it means to them, and Google has done little to change this fact until recently. The fact that Google has not done more to gradually educate its millions of users on the positive aspects of controlling the ads that they see online represents a serious missed opportunity to shift the privacy debate away from "tracking" users online and towards empowering web users to take control of the ads that they see. More >>

Please enjoy this picture while I take some time off from blogging to do real work. These new flowers recently installed on Park Avenue contrast nicely with the snowy cityscape. Winter will end one of these days. Have faith! More >>

After taking a long hiatus from blogging, it is time to pick-up the torch again and start writing. The new Market Anomaly will be a much more focused endeavor centering mainly around Marketing Analytics and Business Intelligence. I'm currently in the middle of launching new Salesforce CRM and email marketing system for my company, so there will be lots of great tips coming your way based on my failures and successes with this rather interesting project. Yes, I am one of those people, who see profiling customers and segmenting databases as kind of cool. Don't hold it against me. More >>