In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by Sorin Patilinet, Senior Director of Marketing Effectiveness at Mars. Sorin is also known as the Marketing Engineer.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 4 April 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Sorin took an unusual route into marketing and has an unusually scientific approach to making every last marketing dollar count. Trained as a telecommunications engineer at university in his native Romania, Sorin applies the rigour of engineering to the not always substantial world of marketing science. In the dozen-plus years he’s worked at Mars, he’s routinely and rigorously put into practice the theories of the How Brands Grow marketing professor, Byron Sharp.

Liverpool and Anderlecht fan, Sorin, is based in Belgium, Brussels. He’s currently writing a book from the perspective of the marketing practitioner, showing how structured, systems thinking can make the “colouring-in department” label sometimes levelled at marketing a thing of the past.

Marketing has changed out of all recognition compared to where it was when Sorin started his career, from 80% of ad spend on linear TV to 27 creatives on 35 platforms with no reliable or consistent, cross-platform means to control reach or frequency. Amid all this complexity, his evidence-based approach to marketing measurement is a breath of fresh air.

So, too, is the ad testing methodology (Agile Creative Expertise or ACE) that Mars has developed under Sorin’s stewardship, based not on claimed intention but instead rooted in actual consumer behaviour. Eye-tracking, attention, and emotion have been found time and again to trump declarative survey findings. This really works at scale, too, with insights derived from more than 800 creative executions a year.

Sorin’s an enthusiastic sceptic when it comes to AI, but he’s keen to point out that the November 2022 appearance of ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg. Mars has been using AI – in the form of machine learning and deep analytics – for years.

An enthusiastic modern-day Stoic and fan on Everyday Stoic, Ryan Holiday, in ten years from now Sorin hopes to be applying the rigour he’s developed for marketing effectiveness to communicating the importance of grand projects such as the European Union or the United Nations to disaffected citizens.

Sorin is a board member of the Attention Council and a guest lecturer at Wharton Business School.

EXTERNAL LINKS

Sorin’s blog: “Engineering Marketing” – https://www.sorinp.com

Sorin’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/patilinet/

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by Olivia Jensen, Director of the Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR) based at the National University of Singapore.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 March 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

IPUR is a research institute that seeks to narrow the gap between people’s perceptions and real-world risks, focused on the data and technology, environment and climate, and health and lifestyle. The Institute brings together basic science, engineering, social sciences, and the humanities.

Olivia Jensen is a passionate advocate and deeply pragmatic practitioner in the art and science of closing the gaps that exist between expert knowledge about risk and public perception of risk. IPUR and the global risk community of which it forms an integral part aims to empower citizens and societies to make better decisions about risk.

Olivia believes that risk-evidence communication is as much about getting experts to understand how and why citizens make decisions as it is about experts explaining the evidence to those citizens.

In considering risk evidence communication under uncertainty, we inevitably talk about Government communication under COVID. Olivia believes that the Government in Singapore got things “just about right”, clearly communicating regularly-updated data and basing its policy decisions on evidence. Sam is rather less complementary about the British Government’s over-politicised use of data in its pandemic communication.

One of the real challenges of risk evidence communication is looking back on events, with narratives constructed that fall victim to hindsight bias. Just because something was possible and it happened doesn’t mean it was inevitable.

Outside of the world of risk, Olivia is a passionate dancer, and in 2024 is learning to tango.

EXTERNAL LINKS

IPUR home page https://ipur.nus.edu.sg

Olivia’s IPUR profile https://ipur.nus.edu.sg/team/olivia-jensen/

IPUR’s EdX course “Understanding and Communicating Risk” https://bit.ly/4dcqQip

Understanding Risk https://understandrisk.org

Risk Know How – a joint venture with Sense About Science https://riskknowhow.org

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, your host Sam Knowles is joined by one of the world’s finest data storytellers, David Spiegelhalter, the statistician and public communicator of his generation. Although he claims to have been retired for five years, the Emeritus Professor of Statistics from Cambridge University is working harder than ever.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 6 March 2024.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

If anyone can be said to have had “a good pandemic”, it was David. “At least I had something to do!” he quips, sharing how he quickly set up a studio at home and gave countless interviews about what the data meant and what we should do as a result.

While he believes that the Chief Scientific and Medical Officers of the U.K. National Health Service usually presented complex information simply and straightforwardly to a willing and receptive public – hungry for evidence of what they might choose to do and why – Government ministers (to the very top) and their Special Advisors (SPADs) had little clue.

Nothing gets David more irritated than wilful misuse of data, and several times during our lively discussion he vents considerable fury at peddlers of misinformation, under COVID and otherwise. We talk a lot about communicating risk (relative and absolute), particularly under uncertainty, with uncertainty the theme of David’s imminent new book, The Art of Uncertainty (to be published by Penguin in September 2024).

Away from the stats lab, we learn how David applied his data-driven smarts to winning the inaugural (and to-date only) Loop World Championship; Loop is pool played on an elliptical table with only one pocket at one of the foci of the ellipse. He also took an evidence-based approach to qualifying for the second round of Winter Wipeout, recorded a dozen years and more ago in Argentina, where David adopted the persona of Professor Risk.

In addition to uncertainty, we also focus on trustworthiness. For David, those using data and statistics to communicate need to earn and constantly re-earn a reputation for being trustworthy. And just as no-one laughs at a comedian who says “I’m funny” at the start of his set, no-one trusts a person using data to communicate complex topics who says “Just trust me!”. Being seen as trustworthy is a consequence of being honest, competent, and reliable.

David introduces Sam and the audience to the skill of “pre-bunking”, and several times warns against building data-driven narratives that push emotional levers or buttons. Data storytellers should present the evidence simply and fairly and then allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. “Treat them as if they’re intelligent, but also as if they don’t know anything.”

EXTERNAL LINKS

Cambridge University personal profile page https://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~david/

David on Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Spiegelhalter

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

After our fourth collection of six great guests, it’s a wrap for Season Four of Data Malarkey – the podcast about using data smarter. Your host, master data storyteller Dr Sam Knowles, picks out common themes and chooses his highlights from a lively series of conversations – recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, between July and December 2023.

Thanks as ever to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

In Season Four, our guests included:

Tracey Brown, director of the charity, Sense About Science.

Mark Montgomery, Vice President and International Head of Integrated Insights at Novartis.

John McFall, military and civvy street logistics expert, and the founder of Supply Chain Wise.

Kieran Maguire, leading football finance academic from the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-host of The Price of Football podcast.

Ian Makgill, founder of Spend Network, a database keeping tabs on the worlds’ Governments’ $13tn spend.

And Mike Bell, data visualiser extraordinaire, who uses the iconography of the London Underground to tell the stories of bands, albums, films, and political careers at his eponymous business, Mike Bell Maps.

Data Malarkey will have its usual, between-season break for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back with Season Five on 8 May 2024, and there’s another glittering array of guests from an increasingly diverse set of professions. We’ll be hearing from women and men at the top of their game from the worlds of statistics, risk management, consumer goods, academic publishing, financial analysis, and autism research. Their common approaches to using data smarter have lessons for us all. And we start with the blockbuster guest, Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a man who had perhaps the best pandemic of any data storyteller in the public domain.

To find out how you rank as a data storyteller, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes to answer 12 questions, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Mike Bell, the first data visualiser to feature in almost 30 episodes of the podcast. Mike is the Founder and Owner of a thriving new business called Mike Bell Maps which describes itself as “Tube maps of bands and other stuff”.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 13 December 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

Mike’s had a long career in creating and running tours for bands, a blend of logistical and strategic planning to the power of Excel. “I see tours in Excel!” he told me when we first met. He moved from arena and stadium tours for bands to production of live events for corporates, staging major conferences and exhibitions right around the world.

A combination of the first COVID lockdown – not a good couple of years for anyone in the live entertainment and production business – and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s some years ago convinced Mike he had to “use it or lose it” when it came to his highly creative, data-driven brain. He started out by trying to represent the career of one of his favourite bands, The Fall, using the iconography, lines, and stations on the London Underground.

Once he’d got The Fall right – to the satisfaction of the brand’s vocal and perhaps a little pedantic fanbase online – Mike’s applied his unique and beautiful way of visualising the world of band line-ups and album contributors to many different spheres. These include films and film genres and even – in perhaps my favourite example – disgraced former Prime Minister Johnson’s political career, with a special line for all those lockdown-breaking parties.

Mike’s encouragement to keep mentally active from his neurologist has paid dividends. Though diagnosed several years ago, his “using it” strategy means he’s not yet been medicated for Parkinson’s. A tale almost as extraordinary as the beautiful manifestations of how he thinks that he now sells, both online and from a new shop in my hometown of Lewes, East Sussex.

Towards the end of our discussion, Mike gives one of the most lyrical and elegiac descriptions of his stock-in-trade, the humble spreadsheet. Once asked to describe them to his grandmother, he said: “They’re like boxes floating in the air that you can connect, tied together with data strings, that allow you to magically make things make sense.” Beautiful!

EXTERNAL LINKS

Mike Bell Maps – https://mikebellmaps.com

Mike’s experiential design business – https://www.freelancevisuals.co.uk

10,000 poems – Mike’s project to take him to 85, writing a poem a day – https://mikebellpoems.com

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles is joined by Ian Makgill, the Founder of Spend Network. Ian and his company are on a mission to improve the global public sector procurement market. Spend Network’s website boldly claims that it can help users to “Unlock the $13 trillion global procurement market through the world’s leading tender, contract, spend and grant data”. That’s about 13% of the total global economy.

Throughout his career – building databases for 20 years and working with AI for six – Ian has been a passionate believer that data can shape our world for the better. While it often feels as if data is used to point at bad stuff that has happened or show where everyone is failing, Ian is committed to telling stories of how his organisation is using data to shape the future.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on 29 November 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

As the driving force behind Spend Network, Ian’s ambition is to level the playing field of Government procurement – from “haircuts in Mexican prisons to airports in China”. As a consequence, every moment of his every working day is steeped in data. Unruly, different, misaligned, fundamentally different data that very definitely is not “apples with apples”. At least when the Spend Network team get their hands on it, bringing together more than 700 diverse sources each day.

“All data is bad; all data is dirty!” observes Ian, “though most of it can be made to be useful”. His sentiment echoing the maxim from the British statistician, George Box, that “All models are wrong; some are useful.” Ian also has elements of the forensic scientist about him, with his observation that “the absence of data is a data point in himself”, bringing to mind our 25 October guest, Professor Angela Gallop, and her encouragement to go looking “when the dogs DON’T bark”.

Spend Network has so far analysed, cleaned, augmented, validated, and verified 220m lines of spend data from hundreds of Government departments around the world. And he and his data wranglers don’t just apply data science smarts to their heavyweight data. They’ve been using AI since 2017.

For Ian, The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch – the paper’s Chief Data Reporter – is a hero of data storytelling and data visualisation, skills that he honed during the pandemic. Burn-Murdoch was the first to conceptualise and visualise excess mortality as the key indicator of Government success (and otherwise) in measures to tackle COVID. Jacob Rees-Mogg is his data devil, thanks to the politician’s imperial measures consultation that provided no option to object (reported here in The Guardian).

EXTERNAL LINKS

Ian’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianmakgill/

Spend Network – https://spendnetwork.com

OpenOpps – https://openopps.com

Spend Network on Twitter / X – https://twitter.com/SpendNetwork

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just two minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.

In this episode of the Data Malarkey podcast, data storyteller Sam Knowles welcomes Kieran Maguire, an acclaimed expert in football finance. Kieran’s a chartered accountant, academic, author, and podcaster. For the past decade, he’s been a lecturer in football finance at the University of Liverpool’s Management School. He often appears in print and particularly broadcast media, making sense of the often bewildering and often chaotic world of football finance. He has a reputation for his “clear-headed and rigorous analysis of the financial imperatives and challenges facing football”.

Kieran’s the author of the critically-acclaimed, award-winning book The Price of Football, the second edition of which was published in 2021. The Price of Football is also the name of his twice-weekly podcast which – since 2019 – has clocked up more than 400 episodes. Kieran presents the podcast alongside the comedian, Kevin Day. He truly is a multi-media expert in football finance.

Our conversation was recorded remotely, via the medium of Riverside.fm, on Transfer Deadline Day at the start of the 2023-24 football season, 1 September 2023.

Thanks to Joe Hickey for production support.

Podcast artwork by Shatter Media.

Voice over by Samantha Boffin.

A Brighton & Hove Albion fan, chartered account Kieran argues that he doesn’t have the communications and networking skills required to pursue a career in finance. He spends his days obsessively updating spreadsheets of football clubs’ finances, ably assisted by more than 250 alerts from the Companies House website. As well as teaching.

The most egregious act of data malarkey Kieran’s observed in the many years he’s been following football finance was the attempted (and still not-dead) breakaway European Super League; “an attempt to steal the heart and soul of football”.

For Kieran, the three biggest myths in football finance are:

1. Spending other people’s money – recklessly – is a good thing

2. Footballers’ wages are too high

3. Tickets for the Premiership are too expensive

The Premier League’s broadcast deals generate 60% of the 20 top flight clubs’ revenues, and the league is the world’s most popular, with live broadcasts and highlights packages sold in 190 countries. And while women’s football is enjoying its highest profile and a surge in popularity thanks to the Lionesses’ ongoing success, Kieran doesn’t think that there will be wage or playing budget parity at elite men’s and women’s clubs (outside of Lewes FC) any time soon.

Manchester City’s men’s team generated £610m in revenue in the 2022-23 season; its women’s team generated £6m. That 100:1 ratio is reflected in the £20m its (injury-prone) midfielder, Kevin de Bruyne, trousers as an annual salary, compared with the highest-paid England women’s player, Leah Williamson, currently on £200,000 a year (or about half of what Harry Kane receives each week from Bayern Munich).

EXTERNAL LINKS

The Price of Football – podcast, books, merch – https://priceoffootball.com

Kieran on Twitter (X) - https://twitter.com/KieranMaguire

Kieran’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieran-maguire-a085033/

A Memorable Gov.uk blog on how Kieran uses Companies House data to keep track of football finance

To find out what kind of data storyteller you are, complete our data storytelling scorecard at https://data-storytelling.scoreapp.com. It takes just a couple of minutes, and we’ll send you your own personalised scorecard which tells you what kind of data storyteller you are.