In search of computational marketing

Ever since reading that article inThe New York Times aboutWall Street-like data analysis being applied to Madison Avenue marketing — what I would callcomputational marketing, as a nod to computational finance — I’ve been searching for more stories about that idea.

It turned into a bit of a nomenclature expedition.

Computational Marketing

A search for “computational marketing” in Google brings back ~1,000 results, with the first page being dominated by a singleSEMPO job posting from January 2007 for a computational marketing internship. (“These opportunities are ideal for mathematics, computer science, operation[s] research, statistics or engineer[ing] students”.)

Most of the job description is grunt work that doesn’t seem particularly computational (“growing a list of reciprocal links”, “mailing list discovery and management”, “reverse word of mouth advertising”). What exactlyis reverse word of mouth advertising? But then the very last bullet is:

Implementing computational marketing campaigns using distributed architecture

You know, in between rote data entry, have the intern kick that out. Oof. This is a classic argument for whymarketing needs a technologist on the management team.

But clearly “computational marketing” has not been a hot term. Bummer, I kind of like it. (Any chance of a rally to make #compmktg a trending topic on Twitter?)

Continues @http://www.chiefmartec.com