• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 9, 2015

Normally, that would just be a snarky headline for a live blog at a MediaPost event, but the truth is it was actually a very keen insight delivered by Amazon Director of Outbound Marketing Donald Parsons during his keynote on Day Two of the Email Insider Summit. And it’s one every marketer, in every category should understand about consumers: They’re not necessarily always-on and always engaged. Sometimes, they’re just doing mindless stuff that may or may not have anything to do with the thing you are trying to market to them. Or, if you think like Parsons and his team, you see an untapped opportunity to lean into the mindlessness.

The insight came to Amazon when consumers like “Eddie” began installing Amazon’s mobile app, which as you might guess, enables Amazon to track oodles of data about its app users -- like where they are, what they’re doing -- and more importantly, what they’re not doing.

In Parsons’ Eddie anecdote, he said this prototypical consumers was standing in line at a Starbucks waiting “10 minutes” to get a cup of coffee. (Been there, done that.) The insight came from tracking Eddie’s tweeting, and understanding the nonsensical nature of his messaging to “understand what his experience is,” said Parsons, adding that after analyzing the data, “We find a new piece of information in this. Eddie’s just wasting time.”

Wow, in 30+ years of covering media, marketing and advertising, I’ve never had a marketer express the notion that consumers aren’t always, well, consuming. That sometimes, they’re just regular people doing regular stuff, that doesn’t necessarily have to do with them being a “target” of a brand’s messages.

Learning that insight, Parsons said, “opens a whole new array of questions marketers can ask customers.”

For example, if a marketer knows a consumer just wants to waste time, “I can help him waste time,” Parsons said, suggesting that the logical app for the standing-in-line-wasting-10-minutes-while-waiting-for-a-cup-of-coffee-at-Starbucks” experience might be from connecting that information with Eddie’s Amazon media consumption behavior and understanding he’s a movie buff and that if Amazon offered him a movie trivia game while he was “wasting” that time, they could actually provide him with a valuable brand experience, connecting and engaging him with Amazon during a time when Eddie would otherwise be disengaged.

All from “the fact that he has to stand in line waiting for coffee,” Parsons said, adding that the real power of Big Data is “making the invisible visible.”

That, he concluded, “is something that is really, really powerful in this new world of data.”