Not really a throwback, but I’m getting enough new data on this site now to start having some fun. Today, I’ll be diving into my site data and seeing what I can tweak to get better readership results. I’m also looking forward to seeing where all my readers are from – in the past, I had a very faithful reader in Ireland so it will be interesting to see if that reader has rejoined me!
I love diving into data and finding a story in what seems like chaos. I think it goes back to my first job at Young & Rubicam in their media department. I was responsible for going through the Nielsen ratings books and entering the ratings for each of the programs that an Advil commercial aired in as well as our competitors. Mind you, a computer would do this all on it’s own today, but back in the day, we had 2 computers for 40 people on my team so humans did a lot more than they do today!
It was a tedious job and most media planners hated it – but I didn’t. I used it to get REALLY familiar with ratings data and had a field day manually figuring out how to get Advil an edge over our competitors with our programming selections on Primetime TV. That granular knowledge of ratings has served me well over the years and even laid the groundwork for the logic I put into place when programming tools for budget tracking and incentive tracking later in my career.
I think what it boils down to is Curiosity. I am NOTHING if not curious about almost everything. I love puzzles and playing in analytics is just one giant puzzle. So excuse me – but I have some data that really needs to be played in today! 
Learn Or Do 