Big Data Primer report identifies Opportunities and Challenges for Advertising and Media Executives

The Council for Research Excellence (CRE) announced it has published the marketing and advertising industry’s first in-depth primer on Big Data. Titled “Big Data: A Primer for Defining and Implementing Big Data in the Marketing and Advertising Industry,” the report is intended to help orient advertising and media executives to the related opportunities and challenges that will arise as the industry goes from megabytes of data on PCs to petabytes of data in the cloud.

The primer includes interviews with several media and marketing executives on how they are using Big Data in their organizations. Later this fall, it will launch in the form of a wiki that will be updated in real time by and for executives across the industry.

The primer was produced by Gerard Broussard, principal, Pre-Meditated Media, under commission by the CRE and direction of the organization’s Big Data Committee, chaired by Stacey Lynn Schulman, executive vice president, analytics and research, Katz Media Group. Broussard is an accomplished advertising researcher with a broad swath of experience covering digital media, audience measurement, ROI modeling, media strategy and marketplace analysis. He served as vice president of media insights and analytics at Canoe Ventures and spent 13 years at WPP/GroupM, where he was the strategic planning research lead at the MediaEdge operating company.

Schulman said, “Our industry has been talking about Big Data for some time, but understanding it is a far different thing. Interviews conducted for the primer made it clear that buy-in is critical to success, and you can’t have buy-in without understanding. We created the primer so we can get the industry on a level playing field, define the terms and have a definitive resource for media and marketing professionals. It is not written for budding data scientists, but for practitioners who are competent in current standard research practices and who want to upgrade their knowledge and skills.”  

Following are some of the insights on the state of Big Data in Marketing and Advertising (BDMA) as identified in the primer:

•     Access to actual transactional data was more closely associated with the definition of Big Data than unstructured data like social media, photos and bulletin boards.
•     Media industry players are in various stages of incorporating Big Data strategies into their organizations, but were remarkably similar in stating that they don’t identify their efforts as such.  Instead, the initiatives tend to fall under corporate strategic umbrellas to provide intelligence and answer important business questions through data.
•     Big Data implementation requires three core elements for success:  top management support to get all functional areas on board and invested; education to secure engagement across the organization; and a purposeful decision to either centralize or de-centralize data scientists within the company.
•     The hottest applications of Big Data today are targeting and addressability, multi-touchpoint analysis and real-time decision making.
•     The most important elements in accelerating Big Data integration are strategy and executive support, acquiring appropriate talent and authenticating persons data.

Later this fall, the primer will serve as the foundation of a wiki to be launched by the CRE. The wiki will be accessible to industry executives, who will be able to use it as a resource for continued learning and post updates and insights in real-time. Details on the wiki will be announced by the CRE in the coming weeks.