• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, June 22, 2013

Paul Barrett, Senior Manager – Big Data, Accenture Interactive, says CMOs are searching for quantifiable information, which has helped big data get a more prominent seat at the table. Social media monitoring and influencing people outside the company has gotten attention. Also, the quest for optimization has changed some viewpoints.

A new area growing is discovery within a marketing organziation, where the charge is to bring big data together to search for new opportunities, Companies can have mindsets where people stop asking questions and that often peters off, but moving into a new sphere where marketers ask new questions and expect new answers about things that impact the bottom line and drive new innovations and exploring opportunities outside "the firewalls of their companies" can be a boon.

Capturing data can be expensive and take time to analyze, Barrett said at the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit, but companies where IT and marketing are tied together can best take advantage of the power of data to take advantage.

Adding value to the business, Barrett says, can come from taking information and embedding algorithms into marketing technology so when you buy advertisng and decide what chanels to use, you change how you spend your money. Whether it is in search, Web site personalization, etc ...

It's obviously tough to break through the clutter in the marketplace with brand marketing, but mastering data and using private, paid and public data offers opportunities. 

So, it is important to reduce friction between systems to find ways to "get data from point A to point B" to help with analytics.

Barrett cited Nike and Verizon as two companies taking advantage of analytics.

"I do think in general, it's a white space for a lot of players" and there remains opportunity to be a first mover.