Commentary

The Omniscient Narrative

There’s a war being waged for control over the marketing stack, and RadiumOne has opened the latest salvo, unveiling a new platform it claims will “unlock the power of big data” in a way that reaches consumers “beyond old school ad retargeting.” Like all things ad-techy, this battle is being fought with a fair amount of hyperbabble -- actually, it is fraught with it. In fact, RadiumOne calls its new offering an “omni-channel platform.” Talk about the hyper-inflation of industry jargon. We’ve evolved from simple channels to cross-channel to omni-channel. The reason it’s hyperbole, if you ask me, is the root word “omni” literally means all encompassing, you know, everything. And frankly, I don’t think anyone can have a platform that accounts for everything. Not unless you are truly omnipotent. And after all, we are just human beings, albeit human beings augmented with some Big Data and pretty fast machines for processing it.


The problem with these claims is that they are just conceits, because they don’t really account for every channel -- just the ones they can account for. In this case, it’s primarily the digital channels that RadiumOne has its hooks into. Don’t get me wrong, RadiumOne’s digital data access is pretty formidable, including online, social, mobile and offline data, But it is not, as the company claims, capable of activating “all existing online and offline data.” The reason: The amount of existing data is infinite, multivariate, and not something anyone or any organization could possibly organize. The best we can do is work with the data we have to filter the most meaningful signals. So please stop making claims that you can do everything.


What I think companies like RadiumOne are actually doing is coming up with better, more scientific methods for organizing and integrating meaningful signals of data in a way that is actionable, projectable, repeatable and plannable. Those are good things. But they are not everything. It’s similar to the old claims that marketing mix modelers made in the 90s, or more recently, some of the claims hifalutin attribution modelers have been making. And here’s the problem, there is a data disequilibrium afoot, with the power shifting to the part that is easily accessible and processable -- and that is mainly digital signals from online, social, and increasingly, mobile. But it isn’t everything. Though it is growing fast.

According to estimates from Facebook, the Internet generates one petabyte of new data about every two days. That’s up from one petabyte per year in 2003.

Recently, I met with Tim Suther, the chief marketing and strategy officer at Axciom, the biggest of the Big Data miners, and I asked him to give me the equivalent number for “all data” being created -- not just digital, but everything. (What RadiumOne might call “omni-data”.) Suther said he wasn’t sure, and would need to do some analysis, but off the top of his head, said it was likely in the zetabytes. What’s a zetabyte? According to Suther, it’s a million petabytes. What’s a petabyte? To put that in perspective, consider that neuroscientists estimate the human brain is capable of storing only about 2.5 petabytes of data. In other words, its more information than I can think of -- literally.


What’s my point? It’s mainly that I think we need to be careful when, as an industry, we throw terms and terminology around in an inflationary manner, because once we’ve raised the bar to omni, where the heck can we go. And if you ask me, given the progression of things, we have to leave some room for upside.

2 comments about "The Omniscient Narrative".
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  1. Dorothy Jean from Dorothy PR, June 5, 2013 at 1:58 p.m.

    Thank you Joe. Keep 'em honest!

  2. William Sears from [x+1], June 5, 2013 at 10:52 p.m.

    Great call out, good to see others are following the [x+1] lead of an integrated hub that tracks across channels. The next important step is not just collecting and aligning data across digital media, social, site, and off-line sources, but taking ACTION on it. A true integrated solution requires DMP, DSP, and analytics under the hood with API connections to ecosystem partners like e-mail, CRM, and call centers. Yep - there is the jargon. But data without action is just learning.

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