Origami launches the periodic table of marketing to make sense of big data chaos

Last quarter investors threw almost $700 million at marketers’ biggest problem: analytics. Today, Origami Logic presented its latest solution to the flood of data that marketing technology platforms generate, consume, and present.

The goal? Making sense of big data chaos.

Today Origami launched what it calls a “Marketing Signals Framework,” which aggregates, organizes, and prioritizes the data that marketers need to review to understand if they’re winning. Those marketing signals are from ad campaigns, search, mobile apps, email campaigns, web platforms, even print and TV marketing.

“Marketing has become a complex, rapidly changing, noisy daily battle,” said Opher Kahane, cofounder and CEO of Origami Logic. “Cutting through this noise and measuring the signals that matter has become a strategic priority.”

Making high-level sense of marketing data is an evolving category at the top end of the exploding analytics space that includes newcomers such as Domo, Beckon, and Origami, as well as more traditional business intelligence tools. They address the challenge that, as Beckon CEO Jenny Zeszut told me a year ago, CMOs have more data than ever before, and are using it less and less … simply because it’s difficult to make sense of the firehose of non-prioritized data.

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Origami launched a year ago to solve the problem, and today’s update aims to unify a view of marketing progress via signals that are categorized into larger objectives, channels, and kind.

Here are a few examples:

Above: Example marketing signals in Origami

Image Credit: John Koetsier

Some of these signals represent the end of a specific campaign, Kahane told me via email. But many reflect the ongoing flow of modern marketing in which marketing technologies “continuously adjust and optimize campaigns mid-flight.”

The signals are also ranked, organized, and color-coded by prospect/customer level: from awareness to engagement, from engagement to conversion, from conversion to loyalty, and from loyalty to advocacy.

(I note Origamic doesn’t have another level — hatred and loathing — that some customers of certain companies seem to attain.)

So it’s not just all about ROI:

“Signals represent results of marketing activity, and ROI is just one example,” Kahane said. “However, signals go beyond representing results. Signals serve as the bridge between raw data and insights, allowing marketers to gain immediate and clear direction on where opportunities lie and how to further improve results.”

Part of the challenge for modern marketers who are confronted with a ceaseless flow of data from an overwhelming variety of channels is knowing if they’re being successful. If they’re winning, in other words. Fixating on one or two metrics is one possible result, with the challenge that those may not be the right ones.

“Keeping score is important, but what is more important is to find ways to win,” said Kahane. “Knowing that you are down 1-3 is useless if it does not help you figure out a way to turn the game around. The Marketing Signals Framework provides a way to not only understand what your score is right now, but also to distinguish ‘real’ goals from ‘vanity’ goals, find ways to score goals faster and better, and make sure that the goals you are scoring are adding up to your objective.”

Beckon launched omnichannel scorecards early this year. Domo brings dashboards from over 300 marketing systems into one dashboard to rule them all. It’ll be interesting to see how marketers react to Origami’s classification and categorization of all marketing signals.