He’s predicted that Barack Obama would win presidency in both 2008 and 2012. He’s predicted which minor league baseball players would be successful in the major league. He’s even predicted which Hollywood actor, director, and movie would take home an Oscar in 2013.
But did he predict just how successful he would become?
Nate Silver has already won several accolades, including TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009 and Rolling Stone’s 100 Agents of Change. His popular political blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, won Best Political Coverage in the 2008 Weblog Awards and “Best Political Blog” in both 2012’s and 2013’s Webby awards. Now he adds to his growing list #1 in Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business 2013.”
Nate Silver, statistician, writer, and psephologist beat out all of the top artists, designers, actors, entrepreneurs and masters of conceptualization in the world to win the recognition. Let me add some emphasis to this: A “number cruncher” (to state his occupation somewhat roughly) dominated over the creators and makers whose stories of inspiration and creative genius have lined Fast Company’s pages for at least the last year.
These are people who are literally paving the road to the future; Nate Silver just predicts it.
Though Nate Silver has been in the public eye since at least the 2008 presidential election, it was really his predictions of the 2012 election that really cemented his celebrity status in the media. Of course, Silver’s popularity could only be helped by off-the-charts mentions of “Big Data” in our day-to-day business conversations. If we look at the implications of Silver’s award from a marketing perspective, (and perhaps using analytical skills, Nate Silver style) we can predict with 95% confidence one business truth: data drives creativity.
We’ve had several discussions about “Big Data,” “Medium Data,” bad data, and even an occasional mention of “evil data” in recent months here at B&B. These conversations are framed within the context of marketing campaigns (with the exception of “evil data”) and which component of strategy truly drives the campaign. Partially based on research and partially based on experience, we’ve come to the conclusion that data-driven decisions are the decisions that will ultimately prove successful. Creative without data, though assuredly really neat and cool to look at, tends to fall flat on expectations. While creative directors and designers will argue with me that data-driven creativity is mediocre, we’ll take the sure bet and follow in the numerical footsteps of the most creative man in business, Nate Silver.
It’s true that deriving useful insights out of the data we create is important, but even Nate Silver acknowledges that not everything is predictable. Unless we are all robots and nothing changes, ever, then we will inevitably encounter unpredictability. It’s what makes us human and what makes marketing a very rewarding challenge.
Even though our best strategies can have solid footing in data, human behavior can knock it all down.
Combining the known with the unknown to make a decision is massively difficult, so to ride the waves of prediction is quite a feat. Nate has predicting future outcomes down to a science, yet it’s his understanding that human interaction can cause disruption that really makes him this year’s most creative person.
By +Maggie Young