Big Data: A Simple Primer from the CRE – Charlene Weisler

The Council for Research Excellence (CRE), facilitated by industry veteran Richard Zackon, is an industry think tank that addresses many top issues in the media industry with committees focused on such subjects as local measurement, social media, cross-platform, ROI and sample quality. The CRE is funded by Nielsen.

There is arguably no bigger topic of discussion in the industry today than the one on Big Data. Many papers have been written -- from such organizations and companies as Google, CIMM, SAS, CRA and even the White House -- describing what big data is and is not, its opportunities and challenges. But there has never been a simple introduction for those in media who may have heard about Big Data but may need more information about it.

The Big Data Committee headed by Stacey Lynn Schulman, EVP Strategy and Analytics at Katz, just released a new Primer on Big Data that serves such a purpose. As Schulman explained, “A lot has been written and a lot more continues to be written but that doesn’t mean that people understand what Big Data is. We wanted to step in and demystify what it is and try to help navigate the waters of who operates in Big Data, how it gets operationalized within organizations today and what the place of traditional market researchers is, as well as data scientists.”

Charlene Weisler: Can you give me some topline takeaways from the paper?

Stacey Lynn Schulman: It’s called a primer so it’s instructive -- it’s a starting point for people so there is a lot of terminology in there, defining terms, what do we really mean by Big Data. We attempt a definition that is very specific to the marketing and advertising industries because, frankly, Big Data can apply to anything in [business]. We wanted to define it for ourselves. We talk about different kinds of companies that are working with this sort of data, various issues that arise in working with this data. It doesn’t go into a significant amount of depth because it is not for the data scientists. It’s really a way to get your feet wet and to feel comfortable having these conversations in your organizations and knowing where to start.

Richard Zackon: I had an additional motivation. I teach a course in audience measurement at NYU and I see 20-somethings whose careers are going to be hugely impacted by Big Data and I wanted to give that group a place to start as well. There is also a free online course that I recommend from Johns Hopkins called The Data Scientist's Toolbox.

CW: How would a big media company start in the arena of Big Data if they haven’t already started?

SLS: One of the reasons why we wrote the primer is to help market research professionals jump start that process and become catalysts in their own organizations. The first thing they have to realize is that it does not sit in just one division or one piece of the company. Harnessing Big Data, finding the data solutions, knowing what data sets you need or data sets you want or data sets you even have -- all of those things require not just the senior researcher but also the technology officers, information officers, contracts for data. Step one is finding the right people in the organization to get together.

RZ: The skills for successful Big Data projects are as much collaborative skills as they are technical skills like machine learning and artificial intelligence.

CW: Looking ahead next year at this time, where do you see Big Data playing out in our industry?

SLS: You will be seeing more automated programmatic solutions fueled by Big Data. And as more and more transactions happen around data like this, we will start looking at that data much more closely and will need to evaluate the quality of that data.

RZ: My first response is that next year at this time we will be talking about Really Big Data. But actually I think it will go the other way. I think the term “Big Data” may become less common and it may become again just data and we will begin to learn how to deal with the shock of the massive terabytes of data coming at us. I suspect it will all just become part of our world.

Interview conducted by Charlene Weisler, Weisler Media LLC. She can be reached through herresearch blog www.WeislerMedia.blogspot.com or at WeislerMedia@yahoo.com. Full disclosure: Charlene hosts a street art blog on The Starry Eye blog community.

Read all Charlene's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Media Insights Q&A.

Check us out on Facebook at MediaBizBloggers.com
Follow our Twitter updates at @MediaBizBlogger

The opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaBizBloggers.com management or associated bloggers. MediaBizBloggers is an open thought leadership platform and readers may share their comments and opinions in response to all commentaries.

Image at top courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net