In digital, you can easily spot two opposing camps — the artists and the quants.
Artists are folks like the New York Times: Pulitzer prize-winning journalists use their intuition and skill — their unique talents — to create one-of-a-kind stories, and the judgment of the Chief Editor is pure gold. Artists create incredible brand value; true loyalty — lifelong fans.
Quants are folks like eHow.com.
Both approaches have problems. If a New York Times writer gets hit by a bus, there’s no replacing them. Their talent dependency is not scalable. eHow stories — millions of them — inspire no loyalty, create no brand value. Let’s face it, it’s crappy content. No wonder Google did everything in its power to kill it.
You might might ask then, how do you get the best of both worlds? There’s clearly a spectrum here; is there such a thing as inspiration at scale, data-driven AND human powered content creation? This question is relevant for more than content publishing — the same applies to:
- E-commerce. Artists: Apple with their Jony Ive videos; quants: Amazon with their algorithmic marketing.
- Recruiting philosophy. Artists: Netflix with their culture deck. Quants: US Army with their personality tests.
Leaders in the field realize the dangers of dogma of both extremes, and try to find the middle ground. Let me share a few examples of folks that do this right.
These folks understand that winning is about art AND science. Human AND machine. Human does the creative work, machine takes care of personalization at scale.
P.S. This article was originally published on GeekWire; I also gave a talk at New Tech Seattle based on this article: