Dashboards are the new PowerPoint

The suspicions of marketing managers are likely to be raised when excited voices emerge from their IT departments talking of new paradigms that will transform their effectiveness. After all, Governments spend billions on data warehouses only to find the data can't be maintained, and major corporations deploy similarly vast sums only to deliver fairly uninspiring summations of their sales by region that look suspiciously like the demo charts in Excel.

At Pointlogic we take a fairly pragmatic approach to technology, so after some positive experiences we wanted to share some good news about a new development in Information Technology – the world of dashboards.


A dashboard is really a glorified description for interactive charts. Usually there will be more than one chart in view, hence the resemblance to a car dashboard. Unlike its motor counterpart, however, the strength of an IT dashboard is its interactive nature. We can have a chart that shows the projected increase in sales from a new product and, if we adjust the price point, we can see what the change might be in the estimate of sales.

The intelligence here lies not in the dashboard, but in the underlying model. The dashboard simply brings it to life.

The technology for delivering this interactivity falls into two main groups. On the one hand, there are dashboards that sit on top of big databases, and these feel more like the traditional 'big IT' solutions. This sort of dashboard is pretty well understood by IT people and of less relevance to the average marketer.

On the other hand, and where we are seeing more excitement among our clients, is the area of light dashboards that can sit on top of econometric model output or market research projects. In the dark days of market research, the end of a project would be marked by the delivery of a tree's worth of hard-copy reports. Now, you are more likely to get a concise selection of charts presented by the project director, who is very much the editor. There is often still a need, however, to see data from a different angle: maybe the results for a different audience, or a 'what-if' projection to see what would happen if the penetration of a product was higher.

In recent projects Pointlogic have successfully delivered interactive dashboards for different kinds of objectives. Dashboards answering questions like "What is the effectiveness of targeted advertising on TV?", "What is the impact of changes in price and other variables on fuel buying in the US?", "How many sales will be generated given a certain communication plan (budget and split across channels)?" These are all dashboards that provide marketers with the necessary insights and help them optimize the return on their marketing investment.

The dashboards are not the smart part of the project – that remains the models or the research designs – but we would flag up to marketers that there is a new cost-effective space between PowerPoint and big software builds that makes projects work harder and gives them a longer shelf-life.

Inez Teunissen, marketing manager at Ditzo, an online insurance company, stated: "Our key challenge was to understand the effectiveness of our mass media communication next to our online communication. Pointlogic helped us reveal these insights with its analytical capabilities, but more importantly by making these insights applicable in an intuitive dashboard. Now, together with our media partners, we are really able to determine the right communication strategy to boost our sales."