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.

Day 3 of the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit is underway with a presentation by Paul Barrett, Senior Manager - Big Data, Accenture Interactive. Barrett, who works in a practice around the CMO agenda, says that issue is being disrupted by technology, partly because of the data explosion.

Barclays is more than just a banking and financial services brand -- It's an agency, suggests Laura DeGraff, director of marketing for Barclaycard. "We function as a brand as well as an agency," DeGraff told attendees of MediaPost's Brand Marketers Summit on Friday, noting that the company's payment business works with about 40 brands. Like any agency worth its salt, Barclaycard has been building up its emerging marketing expertise. "We work with outside agencies, too, which act as an extension of our digital department," DeGraff said. Yet, "Day-to-day is managed internally."

At the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit, Cramer-Krasselt executive Lori Laurent Smith said she moved to the agency from larger holding company entities because she wanted an independent shop that has more integrated offerings. Also, in holding companies, there can be pressures to use specific vendors in, say, the data space as well as put certain executives in front of clients.

Every night, Cisco Systems calculates 5 million cookies that have been placed on consumers' computers. So said Paula Wang, senior manager of marketing platforms at Cisco, as she waded into the company's data strategy. "We can do a lot of fun things with that," Wang said regarding the cookie data. There are surefire ways to know whether consumers are in the market for certain products and services, Wang said. "If consumers are looking at price comparison charts... you know!" That's how the company quantifies what it calls "engagement scoring," Wang added. "We do in-campaign engagement scoring." How does Cisco proceed …

Cisco executive Paula Wang says the company has been doing content marketing for a long time, but with the boom in data-driven marketing the skill sets needed to be an effective marketer have changed. Creative expertise is crucial, but there's a need to "equip oursleves with analytical skills."

Cisco's Paula Wang says a 360-degreee view of the customer is a goal. Social media is helping gain some knowledge there and the company is working to capture potential leads through social channels.

Dlya Jolly, senior product manager at Google, is presenting some of the search and display giant's real-time marketing diagnostics at the Brand Marketers Summit, and she's making a pretty good case for why Google's algorithms are so good at sniffing out the meaningful signals sent by online users that make them potential prospects for Google's brand advertisers. They are so good now, she says, that they can now be deployed at the "scale of TV." She says it was a two-year initiative to build Google's infrastructure and to fine tune its algorithms to get the kind of fidelity necessary to …

Diya Jolly, senior product manager at Google, offered a case study at the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit on how Google used its Affinity groups to help Mazda.

Diya Jolly, senior product manager at Google, is speaking about her company's approach to affinity segments. At the MediaPost Brand Marketers Summit, she says Google believes "audience-based advertising will do for brand marketing online what search has done for direct marketing online."