Every so often, one of the co-hosts of this podcast co-authors a book. And by "every so often" we mean "it's happened once so far." Tim, along with (multi-)past guest Dr. Joe Sutherland, just published Analytics the Right Way: A Business Leader's Guide to Putting Data to Productive Use, and we got to sit them down for a chat about it! From misconceptions about data to the potential outcomes framework to economists as the butt of a joke about the absolute objectivity of data (spoiler: data is not objective), we covered a lot of ground. Even accounting for our (understandable) bias on the matter, we thought the book was a great read, and we think this discussion about some of the highlights will have you agreeing! Order now before it sells out! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Cookies are getting aggressively expired or blocked outright. Referring site information is getting stripped. Adoption of Brave as a browser is on the rise! Yet, marketers still need to quantify the impact of their investments. What is an analyst to do? Does the answer lie in server-side technical solutions? Well, it's not a bad idea to consider that. But, it's almost certainly not "the answer" to the multi-touch attribution question(s). Arguably, a better solution was one proposed by Jan Baptist van Helmont in 1648: randomized controlled trials. On this episode, data scientist Dr. Joe Sutherland returns to the show to talk about the ins and outs of problem formulation, experimental design, the cost of data, and, ultimately, causal inference. This is one of those rare shows where there actually IS a solution to a problem that vexes analysts and their stakeholders. The trick is really just getting the industry to understand and apply the approach! For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.

Did you know that there were monks in the 1400s doing text-based sentiment analysis? Can you name the 2016 movie that starred Amy Adams as a linguist? Have you ever laid awake at night wondering if stopword removal is ever problematic? Is the best therapist you ever had named ELIZA? The common theme across all of these questions is the broad and deep topic of natural language processing (NLP), a topic we've been wanting to form and exchange words regarding for quite some time. Dr. Joe Sutherland, the Head of Data Science at Search Discovery, joined the discussion and converted many of his thoughts on the subject into semantic constructs that, ultimately, were digitized into audio files for your auditory consumption. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.