97 Communications Rebrands as Latticework Insights
To my homies and colleagues.
I’ve got a really exciting update we wanted to share with everyone! As many of you know, I started 97 Communications about 2 years ago. Back in those idyllic pre-Customer, pre-Revenue days, it was just me sitting on my living room couch, sending emails, scheduling lunches, and waiting…
I didn’t have much more than a general POV on what was broken in Media & Advertising, and I wondered if my 20+ years of doing Software Dev & Data Science were going to ladder up to much in terms of fixing them, or if I should just go back to my days serving Frappuccinos at Starbucks (true story).
Fast-forward to now, we’ve been blessed with a rock star portfolio of clients (s/o to SocialGist, Omelet, The Riveter, Gemini, and more), a growing squad of ultra-smart, ultra-dynamic teammates (s/o to Milo, Ashley, Ryan, Tom, and Ez) and not to mention our incredibly crucial technology partners we go-to-market with (s/o to Tableau, Snowflake, FiveTran, Slingwave, and ProductN) .
So now that we’re in this dizzying growth stage of post-Sleep & post-Revenue, it’s started to come into focus that those Data Science skills were not only still relevant (😅) but that they’re some of the most important skills for Media & Advertising in 2019. Harvard Business Review called Data Science “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century”. Digiday called it “Sexy, Mysterious, and Valuable”. AdAge called it part of “The Holy Trinity” of next generation ad skills.
I promptly hung up my barista apron, which I now only take it out for Halloween parties.
But to get specific, the “doing the data science” part isn’t nearly as hard as the “getting to a-ha” part. This is where we saw the big chasm in marketing. That for 2 decades, marketers have been turned off by data’s complexity, and that data scientists have been losing the forest for the trees. And in 2019 - to make matters worse - all the good insights have been shattered across a hundred different data platforms. (Correction: the actual number of data platforms is technically 7,040)
If you’re having trouble reading all these company logos, it’s because there’s too many logos!
This problem is exacerbated by the rampant confusion being caused by GDPR & CCPA; the major walled gardens at Facebook, Google, and The Trade Desk getting even taller walls; and the staggering lack of data skills needed to cope.
3 skills in particular...
Integration: The ability to stitch all these platforms back together.
Analytics: The acumen to build reports that cut through the noise.
Insights: The domain expertise to know what “the big idea” looks like.
Without these 3 skills under one roof, the whole thing tends to fall apart.
Like for example, when a stakeholder asks how their profit margin is holding up against a key demographic group, and the answer is spread across Facebook, Salesforce, Mailchimp, SQL Server, and one of those fancy Excel spreadsheets with 37 tabs. The answer requires building a Latticework of components just to get to the Insights. (See what we did there?)
So we’re bringing this new discipline of skills to market, to help companies “Reconnect the Dots”. This is a big movement, akin to Bill Bernbach bringing Art & Copy under the same umbrella. But if creativity is the unifying force that brings communities together, proper analytics skills give companies the power to inspire creativity that drives real, measurable growth.
We’ve renamed our company Latticework Insights to encapsulate this idea of “data scientists that speak advertising”. An agency with Integration, Analytics, and Insights capabilities under one roof.
We invite you to checkout our website, our instagram, and to shoot any questions or ideas to Tim@LatticeworkInsights.com.
We look forward to working with you to Reconnect all the Dots!