Big Data Meets Big Idea

J. Walter Thompson wondered whether big data could be assembled to paint "The Next Rembrandt" for client ING.

So a team of art historians, scientists, developers and analysts created scans of Rembrandt's 346 extant paintings and used a computer to catalog the data based on commonalities.

They then asked the computer to paint a Rembrandt.

The resulting portrait combines 160,000 fragments of the artist's oeuvre.

HAT TIP: Appraiser Todd Sigety alerted me to this story. 

Hack vs. Hacker

Never mistake a hack for a hacker.

Unless she's evil, a hacker creates code.

A hack creates crap.

In general, a hack's a writer who produces undistinguished prose. (The opprobious name derives from hackney, a horse for hire.)

In marketing, a hack's a writer who's:

• Passionate about content; immune to ideas.
• Happy to plagiarize; put off by research.
• Enamored of opinions; averse to facts.
• Obsessed with quantity; indifferent to quality.

Foremost, a hack's a writer who chases eyeballs.

Speaking of quantity, Express Writers offers a useful hack: publish content of "ideal length."

I'll hack the info graphic. Here's the bottom line:

• Write blog posts 2,000 words long; 
• Write Facebook posts 40 characters long; 
• Write Tweets 11 characters long; and 
• Write Pinterest captions 200 characters long.

Your Ex-Spouse and Your Event Have Something in Common

April 14 marks the first-ever Global Meetings Industry Day.

The event-industry advocacy group Meetings Mean Business joins forces with the Convention Industry Council to celebrate meetings with rallies, proclamations and social media storms.

April 14 is also set aside for National Ex-Spouse Day, National Pecan Day, National Support Teen Literature Day and National Dolphin Day.

Busy day.

10 Tips for Promoting Your Next Event

"Event marketers are used to doing a marketing task and crossing it off their list," says BrightBull director Ricardo Molina. "Social media isn’t like that unfortunately."

Social media takes perseverance to pay off.

Molina offers 10 tips to help you reach the finish line:

1. Start with influencers. Ask them to share their opinions on a topic or discuss what they're reading at the moment.

2. Focus on your audience’s pain. Forget about amassing followers, and focus instead on engaging people by publishing relevant content.

3. Tell a story bigger than your event. Tap into industry trends and news. People will register for your event because your finger's on the pulse.

4. Automate, but don't go on autopilot. Unless you're engaged in online conversations, you're faking it. "Automation can be a great time saver, but unless your technology is enabling you to build better relationships online as well as making your life easier, it's suspect," Molina says.

5. Blog. LinkedIn posts have only hours to work, Tweets only minutes. "Great blog posts deliver traffic for years."

6. Don’t expect influencers to help overnight. Results will take months, and come only if you stay on task.

7. Stick to one voice. Inconsistency detracts. "There's nothing weirder than talking to someone on social media and one day they're all informal and jokey and their next post is like a corporate jargon-athon."

8. Enlist your team. Do more with more. "Even if all they do is retweet or give you a bit of a generic back slap for your content, it all counts."

9. Make social media a habit. "Social media isn't an add on 'seasoning' to an event marketing plan," Molina says. You must make a serious effort.

10. Invite followers. Inform, intrigue, instigate, incent; and eschew all me-talk. "If all you do is go 'me, me, me' it's not going to be the shocker of the century when people stop listening," Molina says.

B2B Becomes B2C. Welcome to Bizarro World.

"Hardly a week goes by without someone saying the worlds of B2B and B2C marketing are converging," Gary Slack wrote recently in this blog.

To picture the two worlds as one, he asks us to imagine a place where municipalities buy equipment on impulse, and manufacturers buy machinery and materials without due diligence.

"Were this all to start happening," Gary says, "pigs would be flying, too. 

"Consumer and business purchasers and purchases are just too different—always have been and always will be."

But what if… just what if, instead of businesses, consumers changed?

In that alternate world:

• All consumers would have split personalities (at least six, called a "team").

• Before every purchase, they would email an inscrutable document to at least 15 suppliers, and demand a response within 10 days.

• All consumers would postpone their purchases until their incomes are certain.

• AdAge would be repackaged as an insert in O, and B2C would collapse into B2B, forming a supercontinent named Omnicom.

Stranger things have happened...

In a pig's eye.