I'm always amazed to read articles like this where some huge and successful industry is just starting to take advantage of the super-obvious benefits that technology has made available to them for years.
I mean, seriously...the advertising industry hasn't been paying attention to the response rate of different variations on marketing campaigns until now? Really? Isn't that, like, one of the key benefits of web advertising over other mediums?
As someone who does this for a living it is not that it wasn't being taken advantage of but that the technology to do it at scale easily was not there -- and still isn't really.
Think about this -- you run an online campaign, serving hundreds of millions to billions of impressions, with different levels of users creating different interactions with your ads, website, etc and a certain percent "converting" to the action you want. How do you reliably process hundreds of millions to billions of rows of data and tie it together? What factors are reliable predictors of future actions? If you increase one aspect does it correlate with other efforts increasing? If there is a flaw in the data collection, how do you spot it?
What about offline behavior? Can you correlate interaction with a widget with store purchase behavior? A lot of activity happens that can never be tracked and it needs to be factored into the models.
So the point being when you dig deep it is not as simple as it seems and there is still a long way to go for all of the technology to work well together and provide the analysis needed to react in real time and change human behavior for the desired result.
AdWords brought this kind of statistical rigor to affiliate marketing quite a while back. What you're describing sounds like the bread and butter of that field. The fact that it is only now catching on in the advertising world seems like an indication of just how behind the times the advertising industry really is. They're a little late to the party if they're only now starting to hire people with statistical expertise to help out with these problems. But from what I know of the ad industry being an East Coast old boy's network, this doesn't surprise me too much.
I worked in the marketing department of a large hotel company before -- they measure this stuff all the time. The one that I worked at employed 6 statisticians with PhDs who ran experiments in SAS with direct mail campaigns all the time.
I mean, seriously...the advertising industry hasn't been paying attention to the response rate of different variations on marketing campaigns until now? Really? Isn't that, like, one of the key benefits of web advertising over other mediums?