INBOX INSIGHTS: Wishing You a Happy and Safe Fourth
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Keep it Simple, Keep it Fun: Your Last-Minute Guide to a Flawless 4th of July BBQ
No hard sell this week. No lessons about building a foundation before introducing new tech. No 5Ps. This week is a big vacation week in the United States, so let’s keep it light. Enjoy your break if you’re fortunate enough to take one this week.
With the Fourth of July upon us, many of you are kicking back, relaxing, and enjoying a well-deserved vacation. The last thing you need is a complicated to-do list for your holiday cookout.
The Only BBQ Tips You Actually Need
Keep it stupid simple. You don’t need 47 different dishes. Get good burgers, decent hot dogs, maybe a pasta salad that doesn’t come from a box. Done. Fruit if you’re feeling fancy.
Prep the night before or suffer. Chop stuff, make burger patties, check lists. Future you will either thank present you or curse your name—your choice.
Check your grill. Nothing kills a party faster than a cold grill and having to frantically call neighbors asking if they have charcoal.
Get more ice. More than you need. It melts fast, and warm drinks on a hot day are a bummer.
Three Recipes That Won’t Stress You Out
Easy Peasy Burgers
Get 80/20 ground beef. Add salt, pepper, garlic powder. Form patties. Don’t overthink it. Grill 4-5 minutes per side. Set up a toppings bar so people stop asking you to customize their order.
Caprese Pasta Salad
AKA “Looks Fancy But Takes 10 Minutes.” Cook pasta, drain, and let cool. Add cherry tomatoes, mozzarella balls, basil, and balsamic dressing. Toss. Refrigerate. Watch people assume you’re some kind of culinary genius.
Grilled Watermelon
Cut watermelon into thick slices. Brush with olive oil. Grill 2-3 minutes per side. Drizzle with honey if you’re feeling fancy. It’s weird, it’s delicious, and everyone will ask for the “recipe.”
Look, your guests won’t remember if the napkins matched the tablecloth. They’ll remember if you were stressed out the whole time or if you actually hung out and had fun with them.
Happy 4th, everyone! Try not to set anything on fire (except the grill).
We’re taking time this week to reset and plan ahead. Stay tuned for some great new content, courses, and offerings in Q3!
In the meantime, feel free to join our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers.
- Katie Robbert, CEO
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Data Diaries: Interesting Data We Found
In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s have some holiday fun. Katie asked for a fun correlation analysis to understand how timely trends could be validated - does one thing correlate to another, accounting for time shifts?
Here’s the trends we want to know:
The theme, in case you were wondering, is fairly apparent from the data.
Now, we could just go to Google Trends and look at a chart, but one of the cardinal rules of trends analysis is that we never, ever eyeball trends. That’s a terrible practice, because our eyes are not designed to interpret data like that:
Instead, we should use statistics software. But wait, you might say, I don’t have statistics software. Or even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it.
This is where generative AI can help - but not regular AI. Regular generative AI can’t do math. We’ve said that forever, and it’s still true. However, Google’s Colab - their data science software - now has Gemini built into it. So we can have it write the statistics software for us.
Let’s load these 5 Google Trends, exported as a single CSV, into Colab and prompt it like this:
Trend Analysis: inspect the following 5 year timeframe CSV to identify trends using correlation - auto correlation, cross correlation, time shifting, time offset. Do individual cross correlations, then group into two sets: cause and effect. The cause trends are fireworks near me, fireworks for sale near me, liquor store near me. The effect trends are hospital near me, ER near me. Do ACF and CCF on the cause and effect trends. Present your conclusions and visualizations of each. Use the appropriate calculation for the dataset in terms of correlation - pearson, spearman, kendall-tau are all good candidates. Determine which is the best choice.
Colab will attempt to write the necessary code from our prompt - which is why we need to be clear and specific - and give us a result.
What do we get as a result?
The clearest, strongest correlation is between liquor store near me and hospital near me, with a 0.65 correlation (very strong!) and an offset of approximately 1.5 weeks. That is to say, people searching for liquor store near me strongly correlate with people searching for hospital near me a week and a half later.
There’s a less significant but still present correlation between the overall causes and effects.
Two key takeaways here: first, if you don’t own stats software or you don’t know how to use it, use an AI tool that can do the stats for you!
Second: please be safe. Alcohol and fireworks don’t mix well, as we have seen in the data.
Happy Independence Day to all who observe it!
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