By Greg Laugero, Vice President Strategy
Last week, I attended Innovation Enterprise’s Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit in Chicago. Sitting through the sessions gave me a pretty good idea of what people think “Predictive Analytics” means. Only a handful of presentations – by representatives from Verizon, the Chicago Cubs and the city of Chicago – fit what I understand Predictive Analytics to be: the use of data models to predict future events based on an understanding of the most important variables affecting past events. In other words – “if these things happen, the this other thing is likely to happen.”
I expected to hear methods and approaches for how to build and maintain these models. I expected to hear business justifications for making the investment in predicting the future. To be sure, this happened in some presentations, but “predictive analytics” at this conference became more of a metaphor for the desire to do more with the data you have.
Day one started with two keynotes that only partially addressed predictive analytics. The Chief Data Scientist at Mashable talked about Mashable Velocity, which helps editors understand which stories are starting to go viral. This helps them prioritize stories that they may want to cover. As far as “predictive” goes, it’s more “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Mashable has 19 million followers and a huge number of unique visitors each day. Once their proprietary algorithms define potentially viral stories, Mashable can nearly single handedly make viral distribution happen. For sure this is an interesting use of big data, but including it in a conference dedicated to Predictive Analytics stretches the concept.
The Chief Analytics Officer (CAO) at Legendary Entertainment presented a compelling approach to how his studio uses big data analytics to “inform creative” (e.g., movie themes, casting, sequels) and “inform marketing”. The lion share of the presentation was more about methods for finding the most likely audience for a given movie and marketing digitally to them. Again, a very interesting and compelling use of big data, but not necessarily “predictive” – more like using data to create the future you want.
Using the Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit as an admittedly small sample, one can only conclude that “predictive analytics” is less of a methodology than it is a broader metaphor for how large organizations (e.g., Netflix, AT&T, Verizon, City of Chicago, Walgreens, Haliburton, Legendary, Sears, Nordstrom, Microsoft) are leading the way when it comes to using data in creative ways. Some of this is truly predictive – “if these things happen, then this other thing is likely to happen”. But a lot of it are just examples of being more creative with advanced analytics and big data.
