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Greater interconnectivity of dataIn the year ahead, we’re not only going to see the continued growth of data volumes, but also new and more effective “keys” to bind that data to individual customers. New technologies will enable marketers to take data from online and offline, across multiple sales and marketing channels, across multiple products and brands, and across the consumer experience — and resolvethat data down to the customer level. That will in turn pave the way for unprecedented personalization – from product development to marketing, as well as “nano-targeting” and “nano-insights.” |
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Increased modeling powerFrom predicting consumer actions, to multi-touch media attribution modeling, to fraud detection, to lookalike modeling – and more – we’re going to see an increase in the power of models leveraging big data. The signal-to-noise will improve as data quantity and quality grows, and models will become better at de-averaging aggregate consumer populations, not just to separate out targets from non-targets, but to resolve important differences among target populations with unprecedented accuracy. |
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Focus on real-time activationThe collection and analysis of big data will be increasingly complemented with a focus on activating that data in real-time, at the point of decisioning. Whether in-store, online, over the phone, etc., the ability to extract from massive data stores the exact relevant and actionable details that will enhance a single customer interaction – and help deliver the desired outcome – will become a differentiating capability. That will involve not just the data itself, but technological infrastructure as well as business processes built around data to enable its extraction, delivery, and packaging, just in time. |
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Innovation around data workflowTools for the manipulation and analysis of big data will become moreconcerned with workflow. That is, how to ensure that the human operators of data systems can work most effectively to extract what they need. As big data becomes mainstream, tools that enable not just data scientists, but product managers, marketing managers, finance managers, etc. to utilize the data and do their jobs more effectively will become common. Look for enterprise software companies to address that opportunity. |