'Human life is being captured by data': Beyond the Brief with Tim Rich, Publicis New York

In addition to his data work, Rich speaks regularly on data and ethics, unstructured data methodologies as well as applied data science in business and advertising.

Prior to joining Publicis New York, Rich worked in e-commerce, building recommender algorithms and applied machining learning frameworks. He served as data scientist at 1stdibs.com, building out luxury marketplace analytics, customer segmentations, and supply and demand models. His 12-year, analytics-centric career, has also included senior positions at Closed Loop Advisors, Haynes & Co. and T-Analytics Inc., among others. He holds a MA in Economic Sociology from Columbia University in New York.

Rich’s passion for the data that he and his team work with every day, coupled with his love for teaching and listening to music, shows he is living beyond the brief.

What was the biggest surprise when you started in advertising?

For me as a data guy, the biggest surprise and perhaps it should not have come as a surprise, is that advertising is the land of “Yes.” I came from the dot com world where much of a data person’s time is not spent on innovation, but rather optimization. For example, optimizing a checkout flow, working to streamline the consumer-site interaction or creating more compelling product recommendation engines.

While in the creative advertising world, creating new wacky ideas is a day-to-day thing. This is absolutely perfect for a data person.

I would argue that in these early days of data, the advertising world is the very best place to be for data people who are interested in pushing the boundaries of algorithms, data sets and social science.

What makes you excited about going to work every day?

Right now, we are witnessing an explosion of different data, both shapes as well as data types. More and more of human life is being captured by data and this creates new possibilities for analysis and ways to learn more about what people are doing and the how they respond to different things.

At a creative agency, we are presented with new data problems every day and we set out to build new approaches to understand how we can create better messages, package our messages and think about ways to measure their impact on culture as we release them into the world.

But to make all of this magic happen, the real thing that keeps me coming to work every day is my team of incredibly hard working, smart and focused people. I work with such diverse people with powerful skill sets and beautiful brains, that every day I look forward to a new puzzle and working together as a team to solve ever-increasing complex challenges.

What should we be talking about in 2018?

I think what we should all be talking about data and ethics. From Russia hacking our elections, data breaches and the strangely ‘sudden’ awakening of our leaders to the understanding the internet is a chaotic meta-level world.

We are talking a lot about the power of data and how it can be used, but few people are talking about proactive steps we as a society of data practitioner should be taking the lead to build a comprehensive code of ethics. Talking about data and ethics as a society will advance many causes that will help us on the day-to-day, protection of data, privacy, fair use of data and hopefully will spur action by the data community to take the difficult step and construct a tentative code of ethics.

What’s your passion outside of advertising?

Truth be told despite my daily data-heavy focus, one of my favorite things to do is purchase vinyl records. I really like the randomness that you get from browsing through record stacks and albums you have never heard, by artists you don’t know. I love the idea that this tactile thing has all this wonderful sound on it, that you have to buy and listen to. In the medium of records, there is no speeding up consumption.

To hear a piece of music, you have to sit down and listen in real time. That necessity of the medium is very important to me in our age of increasing speed of information and information consumption. The act of record shopping is also a rite of organic randomness. What is on this album? Will it be any good? The stacks have things that I have no idea about and the wonderful possibilities of new sounds always keep me excited.

What is an art that you cannot live without?

I was once asked, if you had to go blind or deaf which would you choose? For me, I would go blind. Music, and sound in general, is the most important art in my life. I have become more and more interested in removing the hierarchy of sound after reading John Cage’s classic book 'Silence.'

Walking to work this morning, I marveled at the harmony within the banging of construction noises and the rhythmic tire noise of cars driving on the pavement. Starting to reframe “noise” as a value-less sound brings me clam in an increasingly noisy city and also opens my mind to new sources of knowledge.

We spend too much time in my opinion fitting experiences into hierarchies and because of this miss out on all sorts of opportunities to learn and grow from what may be considered noise, when through a different filter it becomes sound. This thinking also helps me with data as it is such a raw resource, we often only respond to the known use of a given data set, rather than open our minds to alternative approaches to signal and noise.

What non-advertising things do you draw inspiration from?

I draw a lot of inspiration for advertising from sociology and other formal schools of thought. I have recently been re-reading Marx. I truly believe that Marx, if he were alive today, would have been a data scientist.

When you look at what he did, it was data science without data. For example, Marx took the data he had -- observations and history -- and built a theoretical model called Capital. He then projected time through that model creating a prediction of what would happen to society in a capitalist system. His methods were so rigorous, and built not only on other thinkers such as Hagel, but also are surprisingly new and impactful as a method of understanding people’s relationship with work.

Much of my good ideas come from reading the greats like Marx, Durkheim, Veblen, DeLanda and my personal favorite, Max Weber. These thinkers provide a methodological rigor which I feel we in data science are still working hard to build into our practice. They are a consistent source of inspiration for me.