Over twenty years ago marketing was very straightforward. There were not as many channels to reach the consumer, the main forms were TV, radio and print. Reaching the consumer on a wider scale was simply a matter of purchasing either airtime or ad space within the right markets.

Now, digital has changed the game. The advertisement sector is constantly introducing new opportunities. Insead of three channels, marketers can now advertise on more than ten channels and hundreds of different platforms, each with its own analytics and metrics. With these new channels and technolgoies it brings about unprecedented complexity to marketing. Advertisers know that certain channels and platforms perform differently, but how can they find whats best suited for their companies needs?

How can they understand the data thats created when consumers engage with their marketing points? And how can they comprehend the views of their customers, tap new pockets of demand and ultimately grow their business? That’s where big data comes in.

Big data is nothing new, more and more business, both big and small, are beginning to utilise big data as a way to gain more accurate information to better support their business and serve their customers. Big data has become a popular term used to describe the rapid growth and availability of data, both structured and unstructured.

With the use of big data becoming more and more important amongst businesses, it’s even more vital for them to find a way to analyse the ever growing diverse sets of data and give it meaning. Getting the right information for your business is key. Focusing on the right information by asking what’s important to the business is a key point in obtaining better data context.

But why use big data? And why is it so important? Well,the reason is simple- big data is a crucial way for businesses to outperform their peers. Big data will help to create new growth opportunities and entirely new categories of businesses, such as those that aggregate and analyse industry data. Many of these will be companies that sit in the middle of large information flows where data about products and services, buyers and suppliers, consumer preferences and intent can be captured and analysed.

As well as this big data can give you real-time, high-frequency data; and this is also an important factor. For example, ‘nowcasting,’ the ability to estimate metrics such as consumer confidence, instantly, something which previously could only be done retrospectively, is now becoming more extensively used, adding considerable power to prediction. Similarly, the high frequency of data allows users to test theories in near real-time and to a level never before possible.

With the evolving use of big data and the various way in which it can be used to optimise a business, it also brings about new roles within the industry. For example roles such as ‘Data Scientists’ and ‘Data Visualisation Engineers’, are roles which didn’t exist before this demand for big data. They tend to perform a more extensive job, whereas before the job would’ve been done quite informally. Whereas a traditional data analyst may look only at data from a single source – a CRM system, a data scientist will most likely explore and examine data from multiple disparate sources.

Big data will change business, and business will change society .Talking about the future of big data is somewhat beside the point, because it’s very much a “here and now” phenomenon. With this being said the potential is enormous, but it also requires massive amounts of data to be able to make correct decisions. And only a handful of organisations and industries have that amount of data and data sets to make something useful out of it. However with growing technology in a few years time, the use of ‘Big Data’ will not be as limited as it is now.