I kind of think the basic-ness is the point here. The article is mainly about identifying the opportunity, finding and cleaning the data, making some choices about what to feed into the model, and applying results.

Having worked in business-related mathematics (did an MS in industrial engineering/ops research), I have definitely noticed how critical the "non-technical" aspects are, and how much mileage you can get out of relatively basic stuff if you do those steps well (and how little mileage you get out of sophisticated stuff if you haven't).