As marketers, we want to be better consumers of data. Presented with data and its analysis, we want to be able to judge its accuracy and relevance to our decision making. We want to gauge its ambiguity and uncertainty, even though on the surface we’re being presented with quantified “facts.” We want to detect bias [...]

A couple of months ago, I wrote a column on Search Engine Land titled Why Big Testing Will Be Bigger Than Big Data. A shorter spin-off of my post here on the big data bubble in marketing, its overarching message was that in a world of ever more data, experimentation would inevitably become king. The [...]

If I were a marketer psychologist — that is, a therapist to marketing teams, for which I’m sure there’s a market — I could imagine making a fine living by asking open-ended questions, such as “What does marketing science mean to you?”, and holding up a mirror to people’s responses. I hear you say data-driven. [...]

There is tremendous excitement around data-driven marketing. A whole catalog of data-related phrases are echoing throughout the marketing world: big data, data mining, data science, data exchanges, data management platforms, controlled experiments (“big testing“), analytics, metrics, dashboards, etc. But the data driving all these different activities isn’t quite the same. Or, more accurately, the contexts in [...]

In observing the language that CIOs and CMOs alike keep using around the big data bubble — where both parties seem ready to acknowledge that marketing is in the hot seat for making productive use of data — I’m starting to conclude one of two things: “Data” is a euphemism for all application-level marketing technology. [...]

Let’s face it: marketing is in a big data bubble. That’s both a “big data” bubble and, more generally, a big “data” bubble. Everyone is talking about data, big data, data analytics, big data analytics. Vendors, analysts, consultants, pundits, bloggers, etc., are all falling all over themselves to squeeze these terms into their propaganda content [...]

Great article in The New York Times this past weekend, Can Social Media Sell Soap?, sheds some light on the war in marketing between the “humanists” of Don Draper’s world and the “quants” of the digital marketing revolution. The essence of the story: data-driven marketing is incredibly promising, but it is not all-powerful. Those who [...]

Here’s a parting story from 2012 that I think sets the stage for a major theme of 2013: data has power. Last week a newspaper in New York published an interactive map of gun permit owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. It made it effortless for anyone to see who has a gun permit in [...]

Marketers love data. Web analytics, behavioral targeting, social media monitoring, audience measurement, and ever-expanding CRMs are all testament to the demand for more data about prospects and customers. But that kind of data flows one-way: from the outside world into marketing. However, a new way of marketing with data is emerging that heralds a more [...]

Looking for a conference that really pushes the envelope of digital marketing? Last year, I gave a talk at the Semantic Technology Conference on marketing in the semantic web. At the time, the topic was in its infancy. But as predicted, a lot happens in one year. This June, at the 2010 Semantic Technology Conference [...]