Over the past few months I noticed I haven’t been exposing myself enough to what I would consider ‘smart reads’. Working for Christopher Berry I would occasionally get what he coined ‘waves’ of articles, many of which I still have in a make shift digital library. As an exercise and a means of getting some content up on here I figure I would start up my own version of this and try to get these ‘waves’ together as a means to summarize my own top reads for the month. The Goods:
Truthfully I need to sit down and give this a full read (perhaps a blog post is in order…) but the data set analysed on this one is massive! An analysis of 700MM words from 75,000 social media users is probably one of the largest studies of online text out there. What was done on here is pretty awesome as well. Looking at demographic and personality influences , the study takes a look at what common trends occur within these different subgroups . I figure I would group these together.
- First there is this a research paper from JWT on The State of Men which is a quant/qual analysis of the state of Western Men ( the sample is 500 American and 500 British guys) and shared knowledge from a select group of international experts.
- A great follow up to the above article is Ad Week’s “The Millennial Male is Not Who You Think He Is“. I think first it’s a great analysis of the not so rosy picture of the millennial guy, but it also highlights the importance of working off of actual research vs. personal perception in regards to audience insights and planning.
Next up is the article Analyzing bias in opinion polls using R which looks at whether there is bias in political polling . This blog post looked through 14 years of German polling data and did what I feel is a good job at visualizing and doing a comparative analysis of all its sources. To finish this off I’ve included two articles that are a bit more timely rather than deep. The big players online (Google and Microsoft) have started to reveal how they plan to combat the growing ineffectiveness of the tracking cookie in getting you customized ad results. The articles below share a glimpse of their individual plans:
- How Google will be able to track you without cookies
- Bye, Bye Cookie: Microsoft Plots Its Own Tracking Technology to Span Desktop, Mobile, Xbox
So this was done in a bit of an ad hoc manner but here are the articles that were top of mind for me over the past while. As I mentioned earlier this is a project that I’d like to keep going on a monthly basis. I’ll likely release the next wave in mid November. If you want to join in on this, feel free to share your own top reads for the past while in the comments below.