Marketing Data

We’re now in the crossfire of a peaking hype cycle for big data and its inevitable backlash. One marketer the other night was yelling on Twitter, “Big Data People need to GET OFF MY LAWN.” I confess, I empathize with his frustration. Of course, I believe that data — the right data, used in the […]

Let’s face it: we’re swimming in a sea of essentially infinite data at this point. In a recent Teradata report, “lack of needed data” was cited as the least common obstacle to data driven-marketing. Only 22% of the marketers surveyed said that’s what held them back. The most common obstacle? “Lack of process to bring

According to a new study on data-driven marketing by Teradata Applications (the artists formerly known as Aprimo), 45% of marketers believe that data is the most underutilized asset in the marketing organization. Most underutilized. That’s throwing down the gauntlet. And indeed, 78% of the marketers surveyed say that they feel pressure to become more data-driven.

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