Sometimes the oddest stimuli makes one sit up and take notice. Last Wednesday, during a panel at the Adobe Digital Marketing Symposium, NFL director of analytics Aidan Lyons mentioned that NFL.com maintains multiple dashboards, including ones for its editorial and commerce activities.
Nothing unusual there. But Lyons went on to say that the company had taken the dashboards and thrown 'em up on a TV screen in the middle of its office, and that employees in viewing range of these dashboards had taken to monitoring usage spikes on 'em, whether seasonal or daily (Thursday night football, for instance, has an impact – as do vehicular-related news items).
That set off bells. A while back, Kevin Kestler, director of communications for Kestler Financial Group mentioned his firm displays two of its dashboards mounted on large screens within its offices.
There are a couple of great – really great – reasons for doing so. Having these screens prominent in a work situation fosters viewing them and looking at trends and happenstances as a group activity – which increases the likelihood of results being seen as a group responsibility.
And it pretty much guarantees these results – which hopefully reflect not just vanity metrics, but metrics that have a direct impact on organization goals such as revenue or subscribers – remain top of mind. These types of screens, prominently displayed in the workspace, create halo effects: During meetings and planning sessions, managers will be less willing – or able – to arbitrarily decide non-essential measurements (Facebook likes over sales, for instance) are a desired result for a specific campaign. Meeting participants can simply remind all present of the screens and suggest that marketing efforts be focused on outcomes that affect clearly displayed goals.
So bring on the television screens, those electronic bulletin boards of the global village. They're good enough for the entertainment and finance industries: They should be good enough for many more.
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