Big data: Revolutionary PR changes on anvil

Big data will bring about revolutionary changes in public relations, both in campaign planning and implementation as also impact assessment, as the following developments indicate:

·        Darren Oddie, co-founder at Agile.ci, has been talking about the end-to-end landscape for big data-based marketing. Data analytics enables marketing to move from mass communication to right-time dialogue, according to Oddie who had held senior marketing positions at Visa, American Express, Glaxo SmithKline and Reuters

·        WPP, London-based communications giant, has paid $70 million for a 20 per cent stake in Argentine big data marketing services company Globant which employs 2,700 people across 14 cities in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Colombia, the US and the UK. Globant is known for its IT-business-function-convergence-oriented basket of services. These include technical infrastructure and creative agency style design services. Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP, had summed up the rationale for the acquisition. “Increasingly, clients want better coordination between their IT departments and their marketing departments, between their Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and their Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs),” he had said. “There are many consulting companies or digital agencies that are expert in one function or the other. Few, if any, do both and even fewer can integrate deep technical and creative capabilities on a global scale as Globant does. Partnering with Globant will allow our companies to increasingly provide our clients with insights and skills that will make their digital marketing efforts even more effective and simpler to manage at both the front and back ends.”  Globant’s clients inclulde American Express, JP Morgan Chase & Co., LinkedIn, Electronic Arts, Google and Coca-Cola

·        New York Times blogger Nate Silver had attained stardom by accurately predicting the recent US presidential elections, aided by his data sets, his statistical models and his computer. Before poll punditry, he made proven his mettle in baseball and poker

·       George Shen, an information management specialist master with Deloitte Consulting, had written, “Analytics played a bigger and more important role in the (recent US Presidential) election than just predicting the outcome. Analytics was an integral part of the 2012 political campaign... During the six months leading up to the election, the Obama team launched a full-scale and all-front campaign, leveraging Web, mobile, TV, social media and analytics to directly micro-target potential voters and donors with tailored messages.... The Obama campaign management hired a multi-disciplinary team of statisticians, predictive modellers, data-mining experts, mathematicians, software programmers and quantitative analysts. It eventually built an entire analytics department five times as large as that of its 2008 campaign.”

Eric Schmidt, CEO, Goolge, has said, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data.”

According to IBM, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.

David Selinger, Founder, CEO and Data Scientist at RichRelevance, a provider of personalized shopping experiences, has said, “Big Data is the business challenge of the 21st century, and 2012 was the year that the Big Data revolution rocked the C-suite.”

India too will have to catch up, both on corporate and non-corporate fronts... With elections round the corner in India, and increasing apprehensions regarding a more fragmented verdict, it would be interesting to see whether big data will play any role at all in consolidating vote banks.