• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 20, 2013

Data will make consumer behavior, rather than intent or interest, more important to marketing and advertising. I'm not referring to behavioral targeting or remarketing, but to how consumers interact and why they share things.

 The best data people for brand marketing and advertising will come from the fields of psychology and engineering. They will have a strong background in statistics, machine learning, communication, consumer behavior, and social psychology, with a combined background to make the connection between creative and science.

Hungarian physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi recently discovered and reported in Smithsonian magazine that any two of the 14 billion pages -- about 1 trillion Web documents in existence -- are connected within 19 clicks or less. How does this translate into behavior? Understanding the psychology behind the Web will have far reaching implications by producing better connections between brands and consumers.

Barabasi's findings complement others published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The collective editors of the edition, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, and William H. Dutton refer to the discipline Web science. Rather than reduce it to technical parts, they suggests finding the connection between connections.

They suggest it will create challenges similar to better understanding the climate, biological nature or Universe. "The Web is humanity connected and as such we will need to understand ourselves if we are to understand what we have developed and co-created during the past two decades," according to the site. "If we are to anticipate how the Web will develop, we will require insight into our own nature. Web science is not only a new frontier, it is an endeavor that will bring together a new generation of inquiring minds."