Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Public Data Goes Public
Lately, I’ve been entranced by Google’s Public Data Explorer in Labs, launched in March. This builds on the Public Data Search Feature that Google launched last year.
It’s doubly wonderful because it uses the Trendanalyzer software developed by Hans Rosling’s Gapminder foundation and recently sold to Google. (We’ve covered Rosling elsewhere here.) The big breakthrough in this software is using very basic animation, to plot data against time. Graphs have never been so fun to look at.
Check out this video of Ola Rosling (Hans’ son, presumably) pointing out some of the strange patterns that he has found. My favorite is the strong correlation between states that have high percentage of deaths by motor vehicle accident and death by firearm. Why?
The launch of this service was little reported but seems to me to be a big step forward in the liberation of public information. It’s all very well having access to it, but until citizens can analyze it, the true power remains with very few. It’s practical tools like this that allows individual citizens to know what’s going on and petition for change.
It’s easy to see the application of this to marketing. Until now, we could build econometric models that would use public data, but it took time and intense specialization. Now anyone with enough time and interest could look at the correlation of sales to unemployment or illness or whatever.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by OGILVY, ogilvy & mather. ogilvy & mather said: Public Data Goes Public: Lately, I’ve been entranced by Google’s Public Data Explorer in Labs, launched in March…. http://bit.ly/90tRuS [...]
[...] This post was Twitted by clicktag [...]