Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Big Data
The last couple of weeks have seen the ‘new data’ in the news.
The Financial Times ran an article “Smarter Leaders are Betting on Data” by Stefan Stern. This introduced me to a useful idea from Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of Tibco, a software company and general data visionary. He argues that in measurement of consumer activity, we should think of events not transactions or “in-memory analytics” in the jargon.
This means that we should measure in real time and give us much weight to “near misses” as transactions, as these can be even more telling (the behavior leading to one purchase rather than another, for example.
The Economist ran a special report on “The Data Deluge”. The new idea here, I thought, was “six principles for the age of big data”. The premise is that data has now become a major industry in its own right. The most provocative essay focused on regulation. As the industry matures, it will raise a set of quandaries that we should start thinking about now. Here are the six with suggested solutions:
- Privacy: The dilemma is managing the tension between privacy and openness. The solution is allowing individuals to correct their own data. Upcoming technology should enable this.
- Information Security: The 2003 Californian law requiring companies to notify customers of security breaches pushes companies to invest in prevention
- Digital Records: A call for automatic deletion of expired digital records. Yet legislation is moving in the opposite direction.
- Processing Data: Data might promote racial or other discrimination. Solution: regulate against using an individual’s data against him or her on the basis of something that may or may not happen.
- Personal Information as a Property Right: You own your photos, not facebook. Data portability will promote competition, just as cell phone number portability did.
- Integrity of the Information: The World Trade Organization should legislate to protect the data commons.
Big picture stuff, of course. But refreshingly constructive and practical. It seems like the marketing industry should identify its own subset of issues and address them in a similar spirit.
[...] Big Data | The DoubleThink – The Art & Science of the New Marketing [...]