An interesting Pareto pattern identified mining the media data

Reading Time: 3 mins

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, and philosopher. He theorized that approximately 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the population in Italy. Later, this theory got widely popular as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few (or) Pareto Principle. It states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Applications of Pareto Pattern

This Principle can be applied across multiple industries to optimize efforts and generate effective results.

• Software Product Development: In the ecosystem of a software developer, it can be believed that 80 % of the issues are from 20 % of software components.
• Finance:  A Portfolio manager can use this pattern to evaluate that 80% of returns come only from 20% of stocks.
• Advertising: A marketing professional find this in his workflow as 80% traffic coming from 20% of advertizing platforms.
• Business workflow:  A resource allocation manager can see this pattern as 80% of the revenue generated by 20% of employees.
• Logistics: A Cold Storage Manager can find this as 80% sales from 20% consumers each month.
• CRM: A Customer Relationship Manager can see this pattern for their product surveys in NPS(Net Promoter Score) as 20% of products driving 80% NPS.

At Gramener we delivered an analytics solution to one of the world’s largest CPG clients. Their problem was to know ways of increasing the advertising efficiency of their products on TV.

We developed a one-stop analytics platform for their marketing team, which helps them explore weekly insights based on the selections made. It helps the team with improved decision-making to advertise their products on TV. During the Data analysis stage, we found some interesting patterns that satisfy the Pareto Principle.

“For a particular State,80% of the Gross Rating Point (GRP) comes from only 20% of the product genres they advertise on TV.”

From the above visual you can infer that only General Entertainment Channel (GEC) and Movies constitute 80% of the GRP. This helps the team focus much on the two genres to increase outcomes and also to optimize the cost spent on other genres.

Vega Visualization Specification for Developers

{
  "$schema": "https://vega.github.io/schema/vega/v5.json",
  "width": 600,
  "height": 300,
  "title": "Only 20% of Genres Drive 80% of GRP",
  "padding": 5,
  "data": [{"name": "table", "url": "https://api.myjson.com/bins/1fgyzs"}],
  "scales": [
    {
      "name": "xscale",
      "type": "band",
      "domain": {"data": "table", "field": "Genres"},
      "range": "width",
      "padding": 0.05,
      "round": true
    },
    {
      "name": "x",
      "type": "point",
      "paddingOuter": 0.5,
      "range": "width",
      "domain": {"data": "table", "field": "Genres"}
    },
    {
      "name": "y",
      "type": "linear",
      "range": "height",
      "nice": true,
      "zero": true,
      "domain": {"data": "table", "field": "cum_percent"}
    },
    {
      "name": "yscale",
      "domain": {"data": "table", "field": "GRP"},
      "nice": true,
      "range": "height"
    }
  ],
  "axes": [
    {
      "orient": "bottom",
      "tickColor": "white",
      "labelPadding": 10,
      "labelFontSize": 12,
      "titleFontSize": 14,
      "title": "Genres",
      "scale": "xscale"
    },
    {
      "orient": "left",
      "tickColor": "white",
      "labelPadding": 10,
      "labelFontSize": 12,
      "title": "GRP",
      "titleFont": "roboto",
      "titleFontSize": 14,
      "tickCount": 5,
      "scale": "yscale"
    },
    {
      "orient": "right",
      "tickColor": "white",
      "labelPadding": 10,
      "labelFontSize": 12,
      "scale": "y"
    }
  ],
  "marks": [
    {
      "type": "rect",
      "from": {"data": "table"},
      "encode": {
        "enter": {
          "x": {"scale": "xscale", "field": "Genres"},
          "width": {"scale": "xscale", "band": 1},
          "y": {"scale": "yscale", "field": "GRP"},
          "y2": {"scale": "yscale", "value": 0},
          "fill": {"value": "skyblue"}
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "rule",
      "type": "rule",
      "style": ["rule"],
      "encode": {
        "update": {
          "stroke": {"value": "#7b1fa2"},
          "x": {"value": 0},
          "x2": {"field": {"group": "width"}},
          "y": {"scale": "y", "value": 80},
          "strokeWidth": {"value": 2}
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type": "line",
      "from": {"data": "table"},
      "encode": {
        "enter": {
          "interpolate": {"value": "monotone"},
          "x": {"scale": "x", "field": "Genres"},
          "y": {"scale": "y", "field": "cum_percent"},
          "strokeWidth": {"value": 1.4},
          "stroke": {"value": "#c01519"}
        }
      }
    },
    {
      "type": "symbol",
      "from": {"data": "table"},
      "encode": {
        "enter": {
          "interpolate": {"value": "monotone"},
          "x": {"scale": "x", "field": "Genres"},
          "y": {"scale": "y", "field": "cum_percent"},
          "fill": {"value": "#c01519"},
          "shape": {"value": "circle"}
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}