Draper vs. Drucker: Why Mad Men Hate Metrics, and How Marketing Optimization Can Make Peace

Watch Mad Men long enough and you'll see it: the marketing geek shows up with a hefty report on customer data, and the creative team scoffs and tosses the report in the trash. To see Don Draper in action, you'd almost believe the creative genius can act in isolation from all that data and still knock one out of the park every time.

But the character of Don Draper has a dirty secret, and it isn't his past: it's that he's actually working through - gasp! - a strategic marketing scenario in his head every time he has an insight about what motivates the customer. Because as Peter Drucker, one of the founding fathers of the discipline of marketing, famously said: the purpose of marketing is to UNDERSTAND and create a customer.

So what if you combined a gut instinct with some data to prove or disprove it? Why, you could be king of the world! Or at least a revenue-generating badass.

Let Kate O'Neill show you how you can apply a data-guided framework to figure out who might actually be interested in your product or service, and use your creative genius to have the right conversation with them to convince them to buy. And then use data again to get better and better at that process over time.