OM DENNE EPISODE
For roughly five hundred years, bloodletting with leeches was standard medical treatment — and even decades after doctors realised it was probably killing people, they kept doing it, because patients demanded it. That's Dale W. Harrison's analogy for the intent data industry today: happy customers and glowing reviews that prove nothing about whether the product actually works.
This week, Diego Sosa joins Dale in Liam Moroney's usual seat for a deep, methodical breakdown of the idea the show keeps returning to: data is not information. Diego and Dale walk through why ten ebook downloads don't mean ten times the certainty, the name-tags-at-a-networking-event analogy for how information actually works, and why nobody in the intent data industry has ever produced a single graph proving their product does what it claims.
Timestamps
0:00 Cold open: data is not information
0:26 Welcome back, with a new guest in Liam's seat
0:34 Meet Diego Sosa
1:08 The core question: why do we think more data is the answer?
2:07 What “information” actually means
6:59 The ebook download example, and why more never means better
8:18 Why marketers keep falling for this anyway
14:22 Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, and rebranding touch points as signals
16:06 The classic failure: intent data
20:59 A real correlation graph, built from actual sales data
21:27 The name tags analogy: how much information is really in the data
26:46 The iceberg: what you don't see still matters
27:20 Dark social, and why the two buckets end up identical
36:48 Working backwards from success doesn't work, and the measles analogy
38:44 The real closed-won vs. closed-lost numbers on LinkedIn engagement
42:07 The billboard story: proving impact without a click
44:35 The Google ads scam agencies run on branded search
46:17 Diego's first data analytics job, and asking the question before the data
48:36 Intervention vs. no intervention: the umbrella and headache examples
49:06 “They're lying to you”: why intent data doesn't exist
Key Topics Discussed
- Why data is not information, and why more data usually isn't more information
- The ebook download example: why the information curve flattens long before the points curve does
- The name tags analogy: how prior knowledge determines how much a data point can tell you
- Why no intent data vendor has ever produced a real correlation graph
- Working backwards from closed-won accounts doesn't work, illustrated with a measles analogy
- The real numbers: closed-lost deals were more likely to visit the LinkedIn company page than closed-won deals
- The billboard story, and the branded-search scam some agencies run on Google Ads accounts
- Why you have to ask the question before you look at the data
Notable Quotes
“Data is not information. Data is a bucket. It's the bucket that information comes in.” — Dale W. Harrison
“What you see is not all there is, and you don't know how much there isn't.” — Diego Sosa
“They're lying to you. It's a straight lie when they tell you they're selling you intent data, because intent data does not exist.” — Dale W. Harrison
Resources & Mentions
- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver
- Bombora and 6sense (intent data providers)
- Forrester, Gartner, and BCG B2B benchmark data
Next Episode
Back next week with a new episode of B2B Effectiveness.
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