The phrase “Big Animal Pictures” is a jargon phrase in
marketing (and lots of other fields). It
means taking something very complex and explaining it in a way that the
“average person” can understand the complexities quickly and easily.
An important part of most projects I work on is to come up
with “Big Animal Pictures”. Usually the
audience of very complex models/studies includes people with little background
in these complex processes. But it is
always important to explain the process and results in a way that everyone
involved can understand it.
Mostly this is coming up with just the right graphs or
charts to explain the results and avoiding jargon or technical terms in the
description of things. But sometimes it
takes a lot of work to make a complex statistical process understandable. And sometimes it really does take “Big Animal
Pictures”.
In this example below the assignment was not that
complex. We needed to match a very large
customer database to external data to answer some key questions. The matching process was very expensive and
difficult, and only worked 70% of the time.
So we pulled a 12% representative sample of the full customer database
to match. Then we used the parts of our
subsample that matched to estimate what the full database would look like if we
were able to do a full 100% matching.
But repeated attempts to explain this to the client
failed. They just didn’t understand how
matching 8.5% (70% of 12%) could answer questions for the full database. So I produced a deck with a lot of step by
step details given as bullet points and tied it all together with the graphics
below. And it worked to give the client
the comfort level to they needed to proceed.
Phone: 212-529-5337
Voice Mail: 917-838-7966
Email: Rawley.Cooper@AnalyticForensics.com
Address: 23 East Tenth Street #304
New York City, NY 10003