Friday, May 31, 2013

RampUp 2013: On Big Data

I attended the RampUp 2013, LiveRamp Summit yesterday. It was held in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. Approximately two-third of the 1,000+ attendees were from outside California.

What is RampUp?

It's an educational forum uniting data, advertising and technology. The purpose of this year's summit is to engage in dialogue around the convergence of offline and online data (Big Data) in digital advertising.

Big Data is one of the latest key buzzwords in the evolution of marketing. Marketers face a fundamental challenge today, as they're inundated by mass amounts of data from every direction. How do marketers transform all that data into actionable information while creating meaningful relationships with their customers?

Big Data is BIG! 

Here's some high-level stats and comments from some panel discussions:
  • In 1970, there wasn't a single iota of data in existence; by 2003, there was 1.5B gigabytes.
  • There's about 5B gigabytes of traditional data being used by major brands today, coupled with another 5B gigabytes of structured data funneling through ad exchanges and social networks daily.
  • Sorting through this mass amounts of data is a fundamental challenge for companies--there aren't enough data scientists to "off-board" all the data.
  • Off-boarding this massive amount of data requires not only science but art--relying solely on system algorithms is insufficient. A human element is needed to factor in the strategic considerations.
Look out for future posts where I'll cover more specific information from the summit including attribution, re-targeting and highlights from keynote speaker Neal Mohan, Google's VP of Display Advertising.