Data-First Marketing

CHAPTER 2Data Levels the Playing Field: Lessons from Moneyball

If you pay attention to the world around you, it's not hard to understand that we live in the Age of Analytics now. Technology and the digital economy have resulted in an explosion of data that is being used in every industry around us, to greater and lesser extents.

Sports analytics is an industry standard for professional sports worldwide. Every major tennis tournament highlights interesting statistics and even predictive analytics, and the top players – who can afford it – pay six figures to teams of data analysts to give them a competitive edge (Briggs, 2019). Formula One (F1) racing embraces data analytics, embedding over a hundred sensors on each car to generate 3GB of data and 1,500 data points per second during races (Amazon, 2018) – all of which is analyzed to develop winning strategies overall and to make incremental improvements to the cars themselves that can shave critical seconds off of racing times over the course of an F1 season. Analytics, and the ability to invest in it, makes such a difference that F1 is instituting cost caps on things like car development to offset the huge advantages that the richest teams have over the poorest; such advantages currently translate to winning every race (Edelstein, 2019). Even curling is getting into the act, facilitated by sites like curlingzone.com which started by collecting years' worth of curling line scores and eventually developed an “analytics offering ...