Hasta La Creative!

If “big data” sounds daunting, you are not alone. Countless marketers say they don’t even know where to begin — that big data came to them as a mandate from the C-suite rather than something that grew organically within the organization. All that data, flying at us at hyper-speed, to be culled, analyzed and sliced a million different ways until a few key pieces of information that we can use to affect response emerge.

Big data, in certain applications, is almost magical — but if a retailer has 2,000 data points about an individual customer, how does she understand which are the important attributes and which are just noise? Furthermore, what are the odds that she gets a better result with 2,000 attributes than 1,500 or 1,000 or 500? The law of diminishing returns tells us that sometimes a lot is too much. This works to the advantage of organizations with insufficient staff or resources to support a costly big-data play, because what they lack in big-data resources, they can make up for in small data. I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about small data in the year to come.

What is small data anyway?

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