Arabnet Arabnet

This exciting panel session at the ArabNet Digital Summit explored how agencies harness the power of big data to hone their services and reach. The moderator of this panel was Boye Balogun, Managing Director at Future Tech Media, and he spoke with Emanuel de Béjarry, Co-Founder & Partner at Ekimetrics, and Michael Loban, CMO at InfoTrust.

Here are the main points that were tackled during this panel.

On Data that Matters

Many analysts often get overpowered by the notion of big data, but instead of drowning in the chaos, they should start small, and focus their KPIs related to the customer in question. It is estimated that the size of data generated online hit 667 Exabytes (10 to the power of 18) in 2014 alone. Fragments of this data can reveal business insights to brands by measuring, analyzing and understanding user interactions across multiple touch points in their daily online behavior.

Today's rapid surge in big data technologies is allowing better media planning, real-time optimization and highly accurate audience targeting and messaging. Acquiring data is easy, the challenge resides in making sense of how it fits together to open up opportunities for marketers. 

Data, or the compilation of consumer online interactions, must translate that data into understandable statements that depict a phase in the customer path to a conversion. It then becomes easy to have some kind of measured result, this process has worked countless times, and it presents plenty of opportunity for refinement and growth.

On Data Warehousing

No one wants to build a data warehouse; it takes way too long to witness any benefits, and they’re not easy to operate. The panelists suggested the better option of figuring out what data is needed, and how fast it can be used to make better informed marketing decisions.

A Focused Analyst

Analytics can be a company-wide accessibility that everyone leverages and uses, an analyst still needs to pioneer the solution. The panelists both emphasized how that person should focus on getting the value out of the data, and not on storing or collecting it.

Some companies start with a proof of concept, by identifying an idea, making an educated guess or a hypothesis. Then, if it works, they adopt it, thus building a more relevant product or service, and continuing to tweak points accross the customer's path in the future.