Birst named a finalist for the Red Herring 100

Birst is honored to announce that it is a finalist for the "Red Herring 100 North America" award, a prestigious list honoring the year's most promising private technology ventures in North America.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of 1,200.  Nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

There is a lot of excitement here at Birst about being named a finalist, and we're looking forward to presenting our accomplishments at the Red Herring conference where the final winners are named.

We consider this a validation not only of our company and technology, but of the value that we are providing to our customers.  Helping customers to solve their business challenges and achieve greater success is what drives us, and its great to see that, with this nomination, our customers' achievements are also being recognized.





This honor comes as the wave for on-demand business intelligence seems to be rising, as independent analyst Merv Adrian noted in a recent post.

As the saying goes, "Watch this space."

McKinsey on marketing: you already have the data to achieve marketing effectiveness.

The strategic consulting firm McKinsey & Co. has recently come out with a series of articles on marketing measurement and approaching marketing in a downturn (see "Measuring Marketing" and "The downturn's new rules for marketers"), which are both good reads.

What I appreciate about McKinsey & Co. is its dedication to management by metrics and hard facts.  As a result, they can come up with some interesting nuggets about how companies are doing in this current economic conundrum.  For example, their survey in January showed that marketing expenses are being cut less frequently than operating expenses are - 75% of companies are reporting operating expense cuts, while only 45% of companies are reporting marketing cuts.  Not a cause for jubilation, but it's heartening to see that marketing is still seen as vital.  20% of companies are actually increasing marketing spend.

McKinsey can also come up with some no-nonsense suggestions about better management, such as:

• "To weather the storm, it will be necessary to identify anew who and where the profitable customers are and to prioritize the most effective marketing and sales vehicles to reach them."

• "Such extreme uncertainty demands constant attention, frequent reprioritization, and strategies that anticipate and respond to a changing landscape."

If you're a marketer, or a data-friendly person, you're probably saying "Amen" right now.  Such suggestions are solid, but can hardly be called new.  The only shift has been the intensity and urgency of the need to quantify and analyze information.

And if you're a marketer, you'll probably laugh when you get to the article sections showing how some large, well-funded companies with access to lots of detailed information and fancy analysis systems are evaluating their customer base to a deeply detailed level.

"Sure," you're probably thinking, "Data is great, measurements and KPIs are great, but McKinsey is consulting for large, big-budget companies with hot-rod systems already.  What am I supposed to take away from this?"

Well, the sneaky point that the article glosses over is that the  "Measuring Marketing" article also has a chart showing that less than 20% of companies actually quantitatively analyze their data on marketing spend.  It's not that these companies don't have the data.  Over 60% of companies reported that they track media, personnel, and creative costs.   It's just that they don't analyze it.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="375" caption="You already have the data. It's how you put it together for meaning."][/caption]

So the big takeaway from the article is that the answers for achieving better marketing effectiveness are probably in your hands already. You have the data.  The issue just becomes how can you connect it all together and analyze it?  And how can you do that quickly?

To be continued.  .  .

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And yes, we upgraded our website.  Let us know what you think!  We even added a section on marketing analytics and reporting.