Life is too short to pass on sprinkles.

Sprinkles. That’s what you see when you log in to an OROS Analytics dashboard. 

It’s the end result of all the work that went before it.

I’ll explain that. But first, let’s talk about sprinkles. It’s among my top 10 favorite subjects. Who doesn’t love sprinkles?

When someone says they have a box of assorted donuts among mixed company, I always say, “I call the one with sprinkes!” It’s a dad joke, sure, but I’m not kidding. I feel entitled to the sprinkles.

People who know me well, my close family, good friends and favorite colleagues will leave me the best donuts – the frosted ones with sprinkles on my desk. It’s a true display of great admiration, I always say.

But do I really love sprinkles? I mean, do I eat sprinkles by the handful?

Of course not. The donut makes the sprinkles. Without the foundation, the sprinkles are just colorful sugar pellets.

And there you have it. That’s how good dashboards are like sprinkles. We think the dashboards we supply for businesses are awesome, but they can’t exist without the technology stack that powers it.

The dashboards – as great as they are, and as difficult as they are to conceptualize and produce – are the easy part. Creating the visuals that tell your marketing story takes immense talent, planning and creativity, but the end result can be replicated. There are great tools out there that can turn your simple data set into a beautiful visual.

But the technology stack that supplies the foundation of the data, that’s what is missing within most marketing departments and agencies. It takes data engineering, live data connections, a data warehouse, an ETL system, back-ups, etc. It’s expensive and difficult, and not always a core competency in the creative and fast-paced world of marketing and advertising.

It’s hard to do, which is why it’s not being done.

Marketers know they need to measure. And almost all of them measure to some extent.

But the stuff that makes a huge difference in the world of marketing intelligence … things like:

• layering multiple complex datasets
• storing the data in the cloud
• automating the transfer of data
• connecting data through APIs
• making data calculations
• moving data from one warehouse to another to unify all sources, etc.

… those are the things that will confuse anyone trying to move their excel spreadsheet to storytelling visuals. It’s complicated and expensive to master but establishing the technology stack foundation will allow you to see everything you want to see in your dashboards.

Your commitment to that work will help you solve the problems of getting that data out of your finicky POS system or your clunky CRM. It will enable you to get your workbook data into a connected data warehouse. It will allow you to layer and attribute your digital marketing channels. And it will help you create measurement strategies for your traditional marketing tactics to be viewed on the same plane.

With that foundation, you can centralize, unify, map, layer and store your data in a way that can be uniquely presented to you or your client.

Then, after all that work, we are empowered to create dashboards that are engaging to look at, simple enough to make decisions with and share with your team and clients.

Those dashboards might be the only thing most people remember, and that’s OK. Those sprinkles are memorable.

As a sophisticated marketer, you know that measurement is so much more complicated than reproducing and reformatting an export from Facebook insights or Google Analytics. It takes a deep technology stack to create that memorable dashboard.

The foundation wins the awards. But the sprinkles accept the prize and take the bow.