Читать книгу Digital Marketing - Annmarie Hanlon - Страница 36

Originally defined by two NASA researchers, Michael Cox and David Ellsworth, big data referred to large data sets that computers could barely handle (Cox and Ellsworth, 1997).

Some years later, in 2001, Doug Laney published an article about the benefits of central data warehousing due to big data. In the article he coined the concept of the 3V for big data: Volume, Velocity and Variety. This was a great way to describe all aspects of big data as the breadth and depth of data increased (volume), the speed of data (velocity) had increased and different types (variety) of structured and unstructured data appeared (Laney, 2001).

Social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Google gather big data. They have your personal profile details and can see your buying behaviour. This can be overlaid with additional data from third-party sources. This data is fed back to data specialists where the data is integrated, to better inform market research companies.

Two of the main professional data specialists are:

 CACI, whose database named ‘Ocean’ provides lifestyle and demographic details on 48 million adults in the UK.

 Nielsen, another major data specialist, which has amassed data on consumers in 47 countries.

These companies are invaluable resources when you are a busy marketing manager and want to target the right customers with the right message. As professional organisations, they abide by strict rules of conduct. However, there are less scrupulous firms selling data. Within five days of having my academic email address published on the university website, my data had been scraped (see Ethical Insights: Web Scraping) and sold on, which I realised as soon as I started receiving random emails from companies inviting me to attend health and safety conferences.