EMEA > Big Data

It has long been noted that technology itself is no longer a differentiator; but strategy and execution is what paves the way to competitive advantage. To that end, Datacratic recently unveiled the first phase of their vision to help create an open-sourced ad tech environment.

ExchangeWire caught up with James Prudhomme, CEO & Jeremy Barnes, CTO to determine what inspired the project to bring to market an open source bidder solution, how companies can begin integrating and where businesses should be looking to provide value in the ecosystem as underlying technology becomes increasingly commodotised. 

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Robert Jackson is Managing Director at elisaDBI.

2013 has the potential to become the first year that data-driven business will be considered mainstream. Love it or hate it, the hype around Big Data has helped raise awareness of the benefits a data-driven culture can create. The fact is, organisations who adopt it are growing faster, making more profit and being more efficient.

Having worked in web analytics for over seven years now, I’m well acquainted with the pursuit of data-driven business. The removal of intuition in decision making has long been a Shangri La for business owners, managers and marketers alike. As digital marketing began to explode at the beginning of the last decade, there were many who believed that faith-based marketing would disappear. In reality, most companies still have guesswork at the heart of managing huge budgets and important decisions.

December saw the launch of a report by the lottery-backed charity NESTA into the use of data in British business. The first of its kind in Britain, it found that just 18% of the 500 companies surveyed are making effective use of the data they collect. Furthermore, these ‘Datavores’, as the report calls them, are out-manouvering their competitors with sophisticated collection and analysis techniques. These practices are leading to both increased innovation and growth.

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Rob Jackson, MD, Elisa DBi and Scott Brinker, Co-Founder, ION Interative recently caught up to discuss how technology is broadly affecting marketing; the emergence of the marketing technologist; challenges facing companies concerning building a true technology and data-driven culture and whether big data offers meaningful opportunity for marketers or whether it is a big fad.

RJ: So what exactly is a marketing technologist?

SB: A marketing technologist is essentially a technologist who works in marketing. These are the people who configure and manage marketing systems, like marketing automation, develop web sites and mobile apps, drive marketing analytics, implement conversion optimisation programmes, mine insights from big data, etc. They have software programming and IT skills, but their mission — and their passion — is all about marketing.

As marketing migrates further into digital, marketing technologists are more important than ever. They’re the folks who can actually shape the experiences prospects and customers have in these digital channels. That’s an incredibly powerful capability for marketing departments to have today.

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In the 1990s, a typical database consisted of just a couple of megabytes. By 2000 this had significantly increased, and one decade later we’re now storing petabytes of data. What caused this rapid growth and which types of software can help us manage these mountains of data?

The rapid growth of disk space
When I first started developing websites, a typical hosting package had only 25 megabytes of storage. Of course that was intended for personal websites – not large enterprises – but things changed quickly in a very short span of time.

Today, you can store several gigabytes for less than what it used to cost for a few megabytes. This is thanks to advances in technology, stiff competition and most importantly, cheap disks with multiple terabytes of storage. The going rate is now only about 0.05 USD per gigabyte.

The trend of rapidly increasing space and decreasing prices caused people to store more and more data. People tend to be lazy – why bother deleting something if you can just leave it there? You can compare a hard disk to your attic or basement – as long as there is space available, you’ll just keep filling it up with stuff!

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It’s a fact of life that data on the continent doesn’t come in the same convenient packets that it does in the US and UK. The big data providers that we use every day in the UK, such as BlueKai and eXelate, have a lesser presence across the EMEA region.

It’s not that data doesn’t exist in the region, of course it does. However, the data in these markets is often held by different companies, kept in other forms, or may need to be added to offline information to make it truly valuable.

The bottom line is that everyone collects data, but not everyone utilises it effectively, or even realises that information collected as part of their primary business activity might have value.

This means that companies like Videology need to take a more creative approach to sourcing the consumer data required to help our advertising clients reach their target audiences.

Essentially, in order to extract value for agencies, advertisers and publishers, we have identified four key ways of maximising data in EMEA:

First, we work with a variety of companies that collect opt-in consumer data in different ways. It may be data gathered as a byproduct of their business’ core function, or gathering insights that don’t come from conventional cookie-style tracking, but these can be incredibly rich sources of data.

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Most businesses now have a fairly good understanding of what their online media is doing to drive leads to their site, they have a good view of how their site is doing at converting those leads, and decent knowledge of how they are retaining the customers they’ve already won.

Obviously, this requires a vast amount of data to be collected, processed and analysed before any useful insights can be drawn that actually result in improvement and optimisation of web marketing, site design or customer retention strategies. Once the insights begin to be leveraged, though, the benefits can be huge. For a big online retailer, a difference in its site conversion rate of 0.1% can mean a difference of millions of pounds in its revenue.

So, apparently ‘Big Data’ is a big deal, but not for the reason that seems to be assumed. Rarely does looking at information in this way result in a wholesale change to the way a company does something. The reality is that through practice, and trial and error, companies had actually gotten pretty good at doing this stuff anyway.

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ExchangeWire is proud of another stellar event with ATS Paris, featuring the best and brightest of the driving force in French digital advertising. Here’s a quick summary of the day in case you weren’t able to make it or you would like to revisit key points.

SECTION I: DATA – POWERING THE EVOLUTION OF MEDIA BUYING

KEYNOTE 1 (en Français): Our first keynote speaker of the day was Alain Levy, CEO, Weborama, who posed the question: “Are we entering a new age of glory?” and cautioned: not yet. Technology platforms are not stable yet, but are ad networks dead? Not at all. They are valuable partners who give publishers the visibility they need. The light at the end of the tunnel is data. KPIs need to be optimised to the brand and advertisers need to work together using all the data assets available, embracing big data. Sometimes we over-complicate the space: back to basics. Right person, right place, right time. If publishers and tech providers can allocate and use data effectively, and agencies use data to build their KPIs, the industry as a whole can enter the next stage in evolution.

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ATS London Big Data sponsor IBM has just released an in-depth whitepaper addressing the issues surrounding Big Data. As everyone knows, Digital marketing has the potential to extract, interrogate and leverage large volumes of data. The challenges around high-cardinality in key variables, an increasing focus on open-ended analytics, structured versus unstructured data streams are becoming more and more complex.

However, they are also challenges for which there are an increasing number of interesting and applicable technologies that provide the real potential for a long term solution. Finding the right solution involves more than a simple evaluation of price/performance—and not just because measuring performance is inherently ambiguous. It involves the usual work of matching business requirements to the comparative advantages of each possible solution.

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