Data-First Marketing

Preface

From Janet

I was first drawn to a career in marketing as a kid. I vividly remember watching the revolutionary Apple Macintosh ad of 1984 during Super Bowl XVIII and the sense of amazement and wonder I felt after watching the ad. It was like nothing I'd seen before in a TV ad. As a young marketer, I was drawn to Apple's “Think Different.” campaign, featuring inspirational figures that broke the mold, like Gandhi, Muhammad Ali, John Lennon, and more. I still have a copy of the ad featuring Jim Henson – one of my all-time favorites. I also found myself drawn to the inspirational marketing messages of Nike ads of “Just Do It.” or “Stop Dreaming. Start Working.” These ads covered my bulletin board. I loved their creativity and the way they inspired me.

While the creativity of marketing drew me to the profession, marketing was beginning to make a profound shift in the early nineties. I entered marketing, in my estimation, at exactly the right time for me. In 1995, barely out of college and working in my first job, I was invited to a nearby business by a friend to be a part of a focus group to evaluate a new tool to find information on the growing Internet. The search engine I was evaluating that night was Yahoo!

In the mid-nineties, as the Internet began exposing a new, graphical format for finding and reading information on the network, I found myself drawn to it. The World Wide Web and its GUI interface offered me a way to marry my creative side with my technical side, ...