“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Katie Malone, director of data science research and development, at Civis Analytics. Seven years ago, I was hanging out at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, working as a graduate student researcher and riding along as the particle physics community discovered the Higgs Boson.

A few years later, I sat in my first marketing planning meeting, representing the data science team. As a scientist, it was weird. There were a lot of buzzwords thrown around. When people talked about “metrics,” they were referring to impressions, not sales. We spent an hour crafting brand personas, an exercise that seemed to hugely oversimplify the world of potential consumers and leave a lot of potential sales on the table.

Source: adexchanger.com