Digital & Social - The Moneyball effect on advertising

After watching recently the movie Moneyball, I couldn’t help seeing parallels between it - the story of how the Oakland A’s changed baseball by embracing player statistics – and quite a few aspects of digital and social media.

Some parallels are obvious. For example the movie is set in the Bay Area in the early 1990’s, the place where and the time when the whole .com thing began and admittedly crashed soon after. However the parallels I am talking about are a little subtler, so you’ll have to stay with me.  

After losing his star players in the close season and without the cash to replace them, the A’s manager Billy Beane gets creative (or is it uncreative) to level the playing field and bolster his ailing team. His salvation comes from an unlikely source, an economics and statistics whizz, who briefs him on the hidden value players, who unlike superstars, can be snapped up for a song. However the most important insight he learns, is that his first goal shouldn’t be to buy ‘players’, it should be to buy ‘wins’. This apparently obvious approach is alluded to in the movies opening quote, “It’s amazing how little you know about a game you’ve played your whole life”.

Similarly to Beane’s approach to Baseball, without a doubt digital and social media have changed advertising. Like the statistical approach to buying players used by the A’s, the metrics of digital advertising caused consternation and were initially distrusted by many traditionalists. This is particularly true with advertising creatives, who believed they worked in a predominantly artistic medium; conveniently forgetting our job is to sell stuff.

Similarly like the A’s need to make their budget work as hard as it could, digital advertising feeds into the clients’ need to track and quantify, measure and rationalise their expenditure. When it comes to allocating budgets, a hunch or belief is no contest for cold hard data.

The last parallel is based around the most important insight that Beane learns from his stats guru, ‘buying wins’. Look at digital and social media from the client’s perspective and you’ll understand why it’s become so seductive and such an easy sell. All you have to do is substitute the word ‘wins’ for ‘sales’, ‘likes’ or ‘engagement’. It’s far easier to equate the return on expenditure with digital platforms than with traditional media.

However before I get accused of being a member of the digital taliban - as if there weren’t enough already - or get accused of pandering to clients, lets take a step back.

In Moneyball, Beane covers his team’s deficiencies not by signing players who seem to be good instinctively, but by signing those who actually are when you tot up the data. However when it comes to swathes of online advertising, are we looking at the data instinctively or looking at it in the right way? Could we be in danger of being blinded by the numbers and not evaluating what we see? Take for example, two of the cornerstones of digital and social media – ‘engagement’ and ‘likes’. The reality is, most ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are being bought for the chance to win something. In whose book does this pass for engagement? It’s a bribe. Similarly people are always mistaking interaction for engagement. Just because I am interacting with something doesn’t mean I am responding to it emotionally. And especially if there is a prize involved.

What ‘likes’ and ‘interaction’ give you is the start of engagement process, not the end. If you’re a client or a brand, you now have a golden opportunity to deliver something qualitative (and bribes don’t count here) to actually engage your audience with.

And this leads me to the last parallel between Moneyball and online advertising. (Spoiler alert). Although the Oakland A’s and Billy Beane had the advantage of being the only team in the Major League Baseball operating this metrics system, it still wasn’t enough for them to win or even get to the World Series. It seems not everything could be reduced to numbers.