Big Data - keeping it real

Just this week we spent a great couple of days in Chicago at the Pass Business Analytics conference, presenting our thoughts and technology around digital attribution. 

 

In the space of 'Big Data' scale does have its advantages – especially in modelling with the ability to keep those "outliers" in the data set, however there are key principles that still apply when working with 'Big Data' in marketing.

Using the 80/20 rule

20% of the data giving 80% of the value.   

This philosophy I believe should never change, just because the technology allows us sometimes to reverse this rule

Engaging early with the business

Ensuring KPI’s and metrics are agreed and quantified up front – simply thinking you can define these after the event because you are capturing all activity will only lead to complexity, cost and challenges further on.

Causation VS Correlation

They are different.  You must have the context and understanding.

Defining Insights that are actionable

This goes back to my point of early engagement with the business for this to be possible.

People

Data is after all just data – it is the insights that are derived from this data which is key.

Speed

Getting the data in, getting it analysed to make meaningful recommendations in a timely fashion is critical, especially when the window of opportunity is small – we are looking for many incremental improvements, not big bang.

“Thunderstorms” and “Curly Fries” - you're smart

What we share and reveal about ourselves, either consciously through social media or through our browsing habits all contributes to our digital fingerprint – a fingerprint that is then used to categorise us into ‘buckets’ for targeting of marketing activity.
 
How this fingerprint is constructed is always under scrutiny – with a balance of user privacy and the needs of the publisher to generate revenue from their content in constant tension.
 
Recently the announcements from Mozilla around 3^rd party cookies has refocused people on this topic and how the necessary profiling of people to deliver relevant messages needs to move on from the current methods.
 
Better use of ‘public’ data to infer gender, brand preference and age is one area of opportunity – but really what can you infer from this freely available information – quite a lot it would seem.
 
Recent research from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft using Facebook ‘likes’ has been able to correlate ‘likes’ to attributes such as political and sexual orientation, as well as intellect and gender.
 
Using data from 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests to build models analysts were able predict with high probability which ‘buckets’.
 
For example, users who “liked” Thunderstorms and Curly fries were predicted to be of higher intelligence than those who showed affinity towards Harley Davidson and Sephora.
 
On its own it’s application is limited, however if used in combination with others methods of tracking, such as context / semantics and device finger-printing may actually offer a more robust solution (over cookies) to the whole challenge of delivering relevant marketing to users.

research : here

Raising the bar.....

Kinetic from Microsoft raised the bar in gesture control, but a new invention from Canadian startup Thalmic Labs is set to raise the roof, drone or any other device that is connected  to this new gesture control system.

Looking like a large sweat band it detects the electrical activity from muscles as they contract and relax.  

These signals are transmitted wirelessly to software which interprets these into control movements.

This type of control system is significant as wearable technology becomes more pervasive and shrinks in size and removes the need for the user to be in proximity of a ‘monitoring’ device, such as the Leap Motion (due for release May this year) or camera based technologies.  It also has the advantage of being ‘discrete’  - especially when compared to voice based control systems.

Where this becomes really interesting is combining this tech with Google’s googles…..

Mobile Marketing live ‘snacks’

This week sees the first Mobile Marketing Live conference in London’s Angel district.  Spread over two days a combination of seminars and the standard exhibition space it’s a chance to reacquaint yourself with this ubiquitous platform, that in reality is overlooked in terms of both marketing spend and also as part of the engagement with your customers.

Some information “snacks” from my time there today.

IOS6

Appstore now incorporates facebook ‘likes’ into app reviews.  The importance of quality product, regardless of price is even more essential.

Horizontal scrolling within appstore means the real estate allows for paid, free and top grossing to be viewed at once.  

Holding a top three position is now even more important due to this new view, however there is now no button to move to the next 25 items, in effect you can scroll from #1 to#100 without pause.

UDID is now being replaced with Advertiser identifier.   

UDID was attached to the actual device, now it is not – similarities to cookies with the option for users to opt out of tracking and addresses the issue around privacy UDID

More here : http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/27/source-apples-udid-replacement-for-advertisers-in-ios-6-is-broken

Google

Highlighted more people in the world have access to a mobile phone, than a toothbrush.

From a search perspective they see as a % of overall queries 24% come from mobile phones

Mobile generally has higher conversion  ratios than other access methods .

For significant events, such as Mother’s day more flowers of purchased via mobile phone than other methods (blokes down the pub who have forgotten) 

1 out of 4 videos viewed on YouTube are via mobile devices.

That 28% of the total time people are connected to the internet is via mobile.

Paddy Power – 50% of bets come from mobile

That the % of sites that are optimized (truly optimized, not just a scaled down version) is not proportionate to the traffic they command. Organisations should adopt “Intelligent responsive design”

Attribution and the role of mobile requires effort and focus

Google+ is now upto 400 million users, with 100 million regular users

28% of people check their social status before getting out of bed

Tablet sales will outstrip PC sales in the near future.

Guardian

On their mobile users, only 4% access the guardian via their application.

However that 4% represent 40% of the total time people spend on the site.

They are tailoring of content on their sites to the time of day – lunch time VS early evening.

Device usage starts with mobile in the morning, shifts to PC during the day then tablet in the evening.

The online space is still in an embryonic stage, exactly how to monetize this they are still uncertain.

One such idea (broadband levy ) is discussed here :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/23/broadband-levy-save-newspapers  

Bing is........

New marketing campaign from Microsoft to promote Bing encourages users to enter a search term 'Bing is for doing' and then an activity they would like to try 'more than anything in the world'.  


The campaign originally launched on Facebook then 'brings to life' some of these ideas, currently Ines from London climbing up a very big tree in the Amazon - good for Ines, could not think of anything better to do in my spare time.


Nice idea, pushing people to explore the virtues of a search tool which, is progressively improving with features and usability however still surrounded by negativity from existing versions and having to compete with the ever so strong Google.


And there is the problem.


Punching in Bing is....   you are then presented with a number of predictive options which are less than complimentary, maybe someone needs to have a look at their algorithm and make some changes.