I enjoyed Chris Anderson’s keynote address at the DMA. I liked that he was able to boil down a wonky subject like “Big Data” in to something relatable.
In fact, that was one of his main points.
With the proliferation of information, marketers will have to get more comfortable with probability instead of certainty. The numbers won’t always deliver a nice definitive conclusion. As such, we will have to trust our common sense and instincts more to generate plausible hypotheses. We will also have to rely more on in-market “experiments” or testing. He talked about two marketers in particular who rely extensively on testing to help them chart the path forward: Netflix and Amazon.
Testing is obviously nothing new to Hacker Group. PowerTest as a slayer of Big Data – I like it!