Hasta La Creative!

Big Data is still more of a Big Mystery in most marketing departments. Part of the problem is that too many executives think they need to wrap their arms around all analytics and come up with a comprehensive big data strategy. They either want one that’s equated to a series of data-driven tactics or to the building of a complex infrastructure. They also want a plan large enough to encompass the vast swaths of ever-increasing information.

Big data is now native to marketing. Data tools have finally matured enough to become useful, practical and available to CMOs and customer strategy executives. We are now in the age of intelligent marketing technology. More broadly, machine learning is the single most important trend in data and analytics for everybody, not just those trying to use it to unlock revenue growth and new value for customers. Machine learning is going to be the most disruptive economic change since the industrial revolution. Period. All executives — but especially the CEO, CMO and those in strategy — must get ahead of this trend now.

Conservative estimates put the investment in data-driven marketing technologies at more than $3.3 billion in 2014 alone. While the power of machine intelligence to make sense of this data often sounds futuristic, machine intelligence is already here and completely transforming one industry after another. And in the vast majority of cases, it makes better decisions than people do. Consider the Chicago and Los Angeles police departments, which use algorithms to predict crimes before they occur. Or the Microsoft engine that predicted the recent World Cup winners with perfect accuracy, even though the field was rife with upsets. Can you imagine how disruptive this technology will be to the sports gambling industry?

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