Marketers are winning the war to wrest control of so-called big data, as turf wars rage with IT departments over which business unit is best suited to handle large amounts of customer information.
That is the verdict of former Amazon chief Brian Lent, co-founder Medio, a provider of predictive analytics products for the mobile industry.
His comments come as the latest figures from Cisco predict that nearly 19 billion network connections will be operational by 2016 – nearly 2.5 connections for every human on earth – up from 10.3 billion in 2011. It also estimates that global online traffic will be 1.3 zettabytes within three years (a zettabyte equals 1,099,511,627,776 gigabytes).
He said: “The chief marketing officers (CMO) are going to be spending more IT dollars because they, in marketing areas, are driving a lot of the demands for big data.”
However, he has echoed warnings that many retailers are simply unprepared for the coming tidal wave of data being generated through smartphones and tablets.
Lent said that retailers must develop predictive models to identify and monetise mobile customers.
“You can collect and store a lot of data efficiently,” he added. “But if you don’t know how to take that data, do analytics on it, and put it into operational use, you don’t get the real value out of it.”
Lent believes retailers should develop mobile apps that enable rich data collection, which could in turn enable them to develop predictive models to help deliver relevant ads, offers, and promotions and so retain customers.
“The only way to do that in a balanced fashion is with what we call closed loop optimisation,” he said. “As the user clicks on the mobile app, and then the data is logged, we produce a recommendation. It’s the realtime component that makes big data actionable,” he claimed.
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