You are the cookie now, and this has big implications we are only beginning to glean. As data tracking and pooling gauge more intimate aspects of our existence, lawyers are poised to rush in. The ambulance chasers will now be pursuing data, too.

Most small businesses use analytics to make business decisions, find new customers, and nurture the ones they have, per a recent study by Constant Contact, a platform provider for multichannel marketing.

Attitudes among marketers towards data-driven marketing are remarkably consistent around much of the world. But there is much less unanimity around to characterize data-driven marketing and somewhat more confidence in its future than in early results.

In the latest political campaign cycle, marketers embraced advanced data analytics and online targeting in a big way. But their experience also underscored one of the biggest challenges to these platforms: having something to say to the segments you find.

As more devices connect to the Internet, brand marketers will become consumed with trying to figure out how to use the correct data in real time. We've come to know it as the Internet of Things (IoT). SpaceCurve, a Seattle startup specializing in all types of spatial data like longitude and latitude from Twitter tweets, will partner with AirSage, which collects anonymous data. The deal aims to help brands better understand consumer behavior in real time based on time, location, motion, sensor data, and other attributes.

The more a consumer gets targeted by one message on television, the more that consumer loses respect for the brand and the message. The same occurs online. Some 55% of consumers put off buying products or services if they see the same ad run online multiple times, according to a study in which InSkin Media and RAPP Media commissioned ResearchNow to recruit and survey a panel of more than 1,600 U.K. adults.

When it comes to charting the path to purchase within product categories, mobile raises the level of complexity by introducing a new layer of variable that are determined in part by comfort with the technology along with when, where and by whom the device is being used -- and for what purpose.

Marketers relying on a traditional method for calculating return on investment (ROI) of advertising sources and customers bid blindly on media. The social predictive analytics company Ninja Metrics, the brainchild of a University of Southern California professor, believes it can change that by calculating ROI for customers based on a person's social influence.

One of the salient themes of OMMA Chicago's first day was the radical fragmentation of big ideas into much more segmented and targeted smaller executions that require creative elements appropriate to each channel.

It has become so much easier to pick up a smartphone and say "Okay, Google" before using voice search to seek information, compared with trying to type a long query into a tiny little box. It's become such a natural extension of everyday life that 55% of teens between the ages of 13 and 18 use voice search daily, according to a study released by Google Tuesday.