Affinio and the Differences between Useful Data and Fanciful Data

May 17, 2016

I read “Understanding the Cultural Differences Between NASCAR and Formula One Fans [Analysis].” The write up is in a blog post from Affinio. The company describes itself in this way:

Marketing Intelligence that leverages the social graph to understand today’s customer.

The information in the write up presents clusters of interest between the two fan bases for each of these motor sports. F1 consists of clusters labeled this way:

To illustrate the differences, Affinio presents a visualization of the Nascar audience:

The labels strike me as unhelpful; for example, Cluster 14, Cluster 6, etc.

The top interests of the two audiences consist of a collage of small images. I am not sure what each image represents.

Equally unhelpful is the word clouds for each of the audiences; for example:

The map showing the geographic area where F1 is popular focuses on a global scale with a centroid in Western Europe. The absence of a hot spot in the Middle East was puzzling. Is Australia as large an F1 market as the UAE in terms of money spent on F1 activities?

The map for the Nascar market depicts only the US of A. My question, “Why not show a global map?”

Thinking about this analysis, I have several questions:

A list of dot points would get the message across in a more efficient, possibly less confusing way would it not?
What is analyzed? It seems that the single actionable fact is that the F1 market is global and the Nascar market is local.
What are the data sets used for the analysis?
Why are terms like “Cluster 14” used instead of words?

The most important data from my uninformed vantage point is the money generated by the two types of motor racing.

My hunch is that the Affino write up wanted to show off visualizations, not substantive and actionable data analysis. In short, is this marketing or is it substance? I will leave the answer to you, gentle reader.

Stephen E Arnold, May 17, 2016

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Marketing, News, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.