Big Data - Introduction

RAVICHANDRAN
 Session Outline
1. What is Big Data?
2. Big Data History and Current Considerations
3. 3’s V of Big Data
4. Additional Dimensions
5. How Big Data Drives Digital Marketing Success ?
6. Top Uses for Big Data in Digital Marketing
7. How to Target Consumers Digitally with Big Data
8. Sources of Big Data
9. Why big data matters to marketing
10. Three types of big data that are a big deal for marketing
11. Challenges
12. steps for going from big data to better marketing
13. Opportunities
 What is Big Data ?
• Big data is a term that describes the large
volume of data – both structured and
unstructured – that inundates a business on a
day-to-day basis.
• But it’s not the amount of data that’s
important.
• It’s what organizations do with the data that
matters.
• Big data can be analyzed for insights that
lead to better decisions and strategic
business moves
 Big Data History and Current
Considerations
• While the term “big data” is relatively new,
the act of gathering and storing large
amounts of information for eventual
analysis is ages old.
• The concept gained momentum in the
early 2000s when industry analyst Doug
Laney articulated the now-mainstream
definition of big data as the three Vs:
The Meaning of Big Data - 3 V’s

• Three Vs" of
• volume,
• velocity and
• variety
 Volume :

• Organizations collect data from a variety of

sources, including business transactions,
social media and information from sensor
or machine-to-machine data.
• In the past, storing it would’ve been a
problem – but new technologies (such as
Hadoop) have eased the burden.
 About Volume of Data
• Volume is Big Data's greatest challenge and as well
as its greatest opportunity.
• This is because storing, interlinking and processing
vast quantities of digital information offers tremendous
possibilities for a wide range of activities.
• These include predicting customer behaviour,
diagnosing disease, planning healthcare services, and
modelling our climate.
• However, traditional computing solutions like relational
databases are increasingly not capable of handling
such tasks.
• Most traditional computer hardware solutions are also
not scalable to Big Data proportions.
 Velocity:

• Data streams in at an unprecedented

speed and must be dealt with in a timely
manner. sensors and smart metering are
driving the need to deal with torrents of
data in near-real time.
 About Velocity
• Big data velocity also raises a number of key issues.
• For a start, the rate at which data is flowing into most
organizations is increasing beyond the capacity of
their IT systems to store and process.
• In addition, users increasingly want streaming data to
be delivered to them in real time, and often on mobile
devices.
• Online video, location tracking, augmented reality and
many other applications now rely on large quantities of
such high velocity data streams, and for many
companies delivering them is proving quite a
challenge.
 Variety
• Variety :
• Data comes in all types of formats – from
structured, numeric data in traditional
databases to unstructured text documents,
email, video, audio, stock ticker data and
financial transactions.
 About Variety
• Finally, as already highlighted, Big Data is
characterised by its variety, with the types of data
that many organizations are called on to process
becoming increasingly diverse and dense.
• Gone are the days when data centres only had to
process documents, financial transactions, stock
records, and personnel files.
• Today, photographs, audio, video, 3D models,
complex simulations and location data are all
being piled in to many a corporate data silo.
• Many of these Big Data sources are also
almost entirely unstructured, and hence
not easy to categorize, let alone process,
with traditional computing techniques. All
of this means that Big Data is in reality
messy data, with a great deal of effort
required in complex pre-processing and
data cleansing before any meaningful
analysis can be carried out.
 Additional Dimensions
• Variability. In addition to the increasing
velocities and varieties of data, data flows
can be highly inconsistent with periodic
peaks.
• Is something trending in social media?
Daily, seasonal and event-triggered peak
data loads can be challenging to manage.
Even more so with unstructured data.
 Additional Dimensions
• Complexity. Today's data comes from
multiple sources, which makes it difficult to
link, match, cleanse and transform data
across systems.
– However, it’s necessary to connect and
correlate relationships, hierarchies and
multiple data linkages or your data can quickly
spiral out of control.
What is changing in the realm of
big data?
 How Big Data Drives Digital Marketing Success ?

• It’s the age of digital and we are all wired in. Smart
phones, tablets, hundreds of television channels,
thousands of apps, social media, and online
shopping are part of our everyday culture.

• Before the digital revolution, in the not so distant

past, marketers focused on creating compelling
ads for the Sunday circulars, producing television
commercials, and perhaps come up with some
killer creative for a billboard or two.
 Big Data & Marketing
• The job of the marketer has quickly
evolved to keep up with technology and
marketers are now crunching statistics,
targeting individuals versus the masses,
and trying to navigate through thousands
of channels to reach their target audience.
 Top Uses for Big Data in Digital
Marketing
• The research also reports that the top
uses for Big Data in digital marketing
include:
• 29% To better understand customer
insights
• 18% To improve the supply chain
• 16% To power campaigns and promotions
How to Target Consumers Digitally
with Big Data
• When it comes to digital marketing, online data is
the fuel that drives success and marketers must
collect and integrate these online data sets into a
marketing database.
• Marketers may have plenty of off-line data, such
as name, telephone number, or mailing address.
• However, consider that one of the most cost
effective types of digital marketing is email.
• And while email addresses don’t constitute Big
Data, industry averages are $40 ROI for every
dollar spent on email marketing.
 Targeting Consumer digitally
• While email is just one example of how to target
consumers digitally, other forms such as content
marketing and paid search advertising are also
popular strategies in the digital toolkit.
• And as more marketers are becoming comfortable
with this way of on-line messaging, the potential of
Big Data is appealing.
• Beyond more traditional types of data, these Big
Data sets include the thousands of social posts,
searches, transactions, and other hard-to-find data
sets occurring every minute.
 Six Sources of Big Data
The information being generated from Big Data
can be segmented into six specific categories:
1. Web Mining
2. Search Information
3. Social Media
4. Crowd Sourcing
5. Transactional
6. Mobile
 Web Mining
• Web Mining: Data compiled by mining the
open web. This includes automated
processes of discovering and extracting
information from Web documents and
servers, including mining unstructured data.
• This can be information extracted from server
logs and browser activity, information
extracted about the links and structure of a
site, or information extracted from page
content and documents.
 Search Information
Search Information:
• Data available as a result of browser
activity tracking search and intent
behaviour.
• This data also identifies digital audiences
through on boarding (matching consumers
to their online IDs).
 Social Media
• Social Media: The average global Internet
user spends two and a half hours daily on
social media.
• A vast array of data is available on
personal preferences, likes, “check-ins,”
shares, and comments users are making.
 Transactional
• Transactional: Data that is created when
organizations conduct business, and can
be financial, logistical or any related
process involving activities such as
purchases, requests, insurance claims,
deposits, withdrawals, flight reservations,
credit card purchases, etc.
 Mobile
• Mobile: Mobile data is driving the largest
surge in data volume.
• It isn’t only a function of smartphone
penetration and consumer usage patterns.
The data is also created by apps or other
services working in the background.
 Crowd Sourcing
• Crowd Sourcing: This is collective
intelligence gathered from the public.
• Data is compiled from multiple sources or
large communities of people, including
forums, surveys, polls, and other types of
user-generated
 Big Data, Bigger Marketing
• In marketing, the 4Ps define all of marketing
using only four terms.
Product, Promotion, Place, and Price.
• Big data refers to the ever-increasing volume,
velocity, variety, variability and complexity of
information.
• For marketing organizations, big data is the
fundamental consequence of the new
marketing landscape, born from the digital
world we now live in.
• The term "big data" doesn’t just refer to
the data itself;
• it also refers to the challenges, capabilities
and competencies associated with storing
and analyzing such huge data sets to
support a level of decision making that is
more accurate and timely than anything
previously attempted – big-data-driven
decision making.
Why big data matters to marketing

• Having big data doesn’t automatically lead

to better marketing – but the potential is
there. Think of big data as your secret
ingredient, your raw material, your
essential element.
• By combining big data with an integrated
marketing management strategy,
marketing organizations can make a
substantial impact in these key areas:
 Why big data matters to marketing
?
• Customer engagement. Big data can deliver insight
into not just who your customers are, but where they
are, what they want, how they want to be contacted
and when.
• Customer retention and loyalty. Big data can help
you discover what influences customer loyalty and
what keeps them coming back again and again.
• Marketing optimization/performance. With big data,
you can determine the optimal marketing spend
across multiple channels, as well as continuously
optimize marketing programs through testing,
measurement and analysis.
 Three types of big data that are a
big deal for marketing
• Customer: The big data category most familiar to marketing
may include behavioral, attitudinal and transactional metrics
from such sources as marketing campaigns, points of sale,
websites, customer surveys, social media, online communities
and loyalty programs.

• Operational: This big data category typically includes

objective metrics that measure the quality of marketing
processes relating to marketing operations, resource
allocation, asset management, budgetary controls, etc.
• Financial: Typically housed in an organization’s financial
systems, this big data category may include sales, revenue,
profits and other objective data types that measure the
financial health of the organization.
 Challenges

• The challenges related to the effective use

of big data can be especially daunting for
marketing.
• That's because most analytic systems are
not aligned to the marketing organization’s
data, processes and decisions.
• For marketing, three of the biggest
challenges are:
 Challenges
1. Knowing what data to gather. Data, data everywhere. You
have enormous volumes of customer, operational and
financial data to contend with. But more is not necessarily
better – it has to be the right data.
2. Knowing which analytical tools to use. As the volume of
big data grows, the time available for making decisions and
acting on them is shrinking. Analytical tools can help you
aggregate and analyze data, as well as allocate relevant
insights and decisions appropriately throughout the
organization – but which ones?
3. Knowing how to go from data to insight to impact. Once
you have the data, how do you turn it into insight? And how
do you use that insight to make a positive impact on your
marketing programs?
 Three steps for going from big data to
better marketing
• Big data is a big deal in marketing. But
there are a few things every marketer
should keep in mind to help ensure that
big data will lead to big success:
 1. Use big data to dig for deeper
insight.
Use big data to dig for deeper insight.
• Big data affords you the opportunity to dig
deeper and deeper into the data, peeling
back layers to reveal richer insights.
• The insights you gain from your initial
analysis can be explored further, with richer,
deeper insights emerging each time.
• This level of insight can help you develop
specific strategies and actions to drive
growth.
 2. Steps – Big Data to Better
Marketing
Get insights from big data to those who can
use it.
• There’s no debating it – CMOs need the
meaningful insights that big data can provide;
but so do front-line store managers, and call
center phone staff, and sales associates, and
so on and so on.
• What good is insight if it stays within the
confines of the board room? Get it into the
hands of those who can act on it.
 3. Steps – Big Data to Better
Marketing
Don’t try to save the world – at least not at
first.
• Taking on big data can at times seem
overwhelming, so start out by focusing on a few
key objectives.
• What outcomes would you like to improve?
Once you decide that, you can identify what data
you would need to support the related analysis.
• When you’ve completed that exercise, move on
to your next objective. And the next.
Big Data – Opportunities ?