S&M (Science & Media)

Some people foolishly believe that media is an art. It's not, it is a science.

While it is fun to win awards & do tactical campaigns the nuts & bolts of the business is the drudge of daily buying. And as in science we can continually test our theories & experiment with new hypotheses. However our business is littered with arts graduates, myself included. We are very good at coming up with fancy names for simple things; amplify for spread, communication architect for media planner & channel envy for "I wish I'd thought of that". We are not so good at understanding statistics, logic & even simple arithmetic.

 Luckily there are three excellent books you can read to correct your numerical ignorance. None of them are specific to media but numbers are numbers & they will help the mathmatically abused understand some basic laws.

 The first is Risk by Dan Gardner. The second is Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt. And the third is Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. Happy reading.