I had been discussing Netflix/Amazon Prime with someone in the light of the “streaming wars”. It was almost too tempting to draw parallels with the healthcare industry, but we’d consider this scenario first:
When streaming video companies release single data points, they usually only give us two of the five W’s. First, they give us the “who”—customer accounts, customers or monthly active users. And they give us the “where” in the broadest sense possible in that they give us the “global numbers”. But crucially they always omit the “what”. How many minutes were viewed per person? The “when” is also usually implied, but not explicitly stated, usually so that the numbers are as large as possible. In the case of The Christmas Chronicles, they gave us the “what”, but left out the why.
As a result, usually we can learn very little as competitors, observers or investors from these nuggets. A contrarian might say, look here, Entertainment Strategy Guy, you said in this very early article that you LOVE data. At least these companies are providing us some data.
As a standalone, this data has no meaning. We are slicing and dicing the healthcare data, for example, to try and draw correlations but we aren’t landing anywhere in terms of “moving the needle” for a cure.
Here’s another exciting blurb from the write up:
I have a new name for this. Even if you have a data point, that still isn’t “data”. It’s an anecdote. It’s a “datecdote”, an anecdote of data. Interesting, but not enough to base decisions off of.
Netflix, we’ve been told, isn’t an entertainment company, they’re a product company that leverages huge amounts of data to deliver us our entertainment. Maybe that’s true, for internal work. But when it comes to PR? Netflix isn’t a data company. They’re an anecdote company. They’re a datecdote company.
I’ll also probably invent a neologism for the “data-dectote” something we all know- the gold rush for the CAR-TCell that’s the new “goose laying the golden eggs paid by the insurance company”. We still don’t have data on it yet, we are surviving on the nuggets of “promised breakthroughs”.
(This aside, who will win the streaming wars? My guess is Netflix. Fair and square. It is because it understands the distribution channel and can quickly raise prices without the churn. It has the most valuable data on preferences and understands the viewer tastes completely).
RadOncNotes 