• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, January 23, 2013

In the day’s first panel featuring brand marketers, Grazia Ochoa, Director, Global Digital Marketing, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, warned against getting too caught up in possibilities opened up by Big Data. She said marketers can lured into creating and trakcking peripheral kpis instead of focusing on traditional ones. At Starwood, the bottom line is that “We’re there to put heads in beds. I can try to prove brand goals all day but those goals must trickle down,” said Ochoa. She also noted that incorporating more data into marketing is expensive and can end up cost more than it’s worth instead of increasing efficiency.