Big Data Marketing (Part 1)- Author starts off her book by talking about how marketing has been viewed for decades. It has envisioned by marketers to be one-to-one relationships with customers.She talks about The One to One Future being published in '93 and becoming the marketer's bible by inspiring new customers relationship strategies and insights into ways to better engage through true one-to-one experiences. However, with outdated, ineffective and ad hoc internal marketing processes, coupled with fragmented and missing data, this leading to flat, one size fits all messaging and interactions rather than one-to-one. Author is making an appeal to begin one-to-one marketing interactions. "We must market like we communicate in our everyday lives, as one individual to another..." (8) This is urgent because companies are facing continued consumer pressure to step-up with compelling experiences now and digital disruption (defined as how technology and data are changing our culture and throwing communication into disorder) threatens all of this. The impact of digital disruption can't be felt everywhere from business to business, business to consumer, etc. No business can escape the relentless pace of tech change. Companies need to adopt more flexible and iterative approaches to planning because the rate of tech change will never be slower than it is today. She calls for marketers and all of us in general to move past the fear of digital disruption so we can confront it. As consumer power grows, not only are customers controlling that market conversation but they're bound to demand more control of their personal data as well.
The companies that thrive will be ones who build individual relationships with buyers. Marketers stand to benefit the most from understanding the consumer better through data analysis. This isn't a negative change- it just a phenomenon that can be worked with. Author continues by advocating further for marketing being data driven. She says that it makes marketing more effective in planning, executing, and valuable. It helps marketers make better decisions, that are more effective. It does more than engage current customers, it also invites new ones. She compares this age to the Renaissance calling it the Enlightened Age of Data.
Reaction- This part of Author's book makes a lot of sense to me and it's nice to get a perspective from inside marketing. The history of how marketing has been viewed was helpful in understanding the goals marketing is trying to achieve now. I think that Big Data will help marketing be more successful in making those personal connections with their clients and the consumers. The way this piece is written as a guide for marketers which means reading this should hopefully help me startmy career in PR and Marketing. This book tells marketers how to be successful in this Digital disruption shift into the Enlightened Age of Data. This puts Big Data in a more positive light then other pieces of have read. My sense of morality is not alerted by reading this because the marketers are shown to have good intentions.
End of Theory- Anderson believes that we should embrace Google to learn from their methods. He writes that "Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age." The Petabyte Age is different from previous ages because having more information requires a difference in how its handled. Rather than being stored in something we can hold like a floppy disk, Petabytes are stored in the cloud. At the petabyte scale, we are forced to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics by assuming that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. They were right in that no semantic or causal analysis was required. If the statistics of incoming links say it is working, that's good enough. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and it can be tracked and measured. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
Massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool including the scientific method. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses and this is the way science has worked for hundreds of years. Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation because it could just be a coincidence. Instead, they must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Now with massive data, this hypothesize, model, test approach is becoming obsolete. Correlation is enough. Anderson emphasizes that "we can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot." This huge amount of data along with statistical tools offers a whole new way of understanding the world.
Reaction- With the Anderson piece, I found myself buying into his argument. Google does have new and interesting methods that work with correlation and offer new ways of understand our world. The growth of data was interesting to me because although I have lived through the progression from floppy disk to storing information on the cloud, I never thought about how different that would make our society. I was really impressed with some of the examples Anderson gave abut how this Big Data has changed not only Google and advertising but science as well. He says that this we can let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot. "The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms." Would this have been possible without supercomputers? I don't think so. My only worry is that people will use the data for wrong doing. All technologies have good and bad uses.
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