Intelligently Marketing Business Intelligence

It seems like everyone is talking about BI or Big Data these days. It is a topic that cycles under different monikers, but it always promises the nirvana of users being able to access and visualize data “free of IT constraints” (read…. you don’t have to submit a work request into a queue for a developer to create for you).

There are many companies out there working on it – and they are hitting YouTube to take their message to the people. But their videos are almost uniformly boring and unappealing visually. For companies promoting their ability to make data accessible and fun to play with, their product videos almost uniformly boring, using the same old buzzwords (drill down! powerful! dashboards! executive dashboards! key metrics! filters! woo-hoo!) and displaying pretty old-fashioned looking bar charts, spreadsheets, and maybe a few speedometers for ‘fancy’ stuff.

Here’s an example in the video below. Birst might be a great product – I have no idea. But I could replace their product name with just about anything and the talk track still works. Plus, it is delivered in the standard monotone perfection of a carefully crafted script being read with well honed and carefully rehearsed inflections. When are companies going to figure out that social media isn’t just cheap TV or radio – it is an opportunity to bring a product to life, to show real people doing real things, and to provide authenticity in the experience of watching a campaign. Even BI can be compelling, but it takes an intelligent marketing strategy to make it come to life.