What is big data and why are marketers interested in it?

What will be an ideal response?

Big data usually refers to very large data sets in the petabyte and exabyte range–in other words, billions to trillions of records, often from different sources. Big data is produced in much larger quantities and much more rapidly than traditional data collection mechanisms. Even though tweets are limited to 140 characters each, Twitter generates more than eight terabytes of data daily. According to the IDC technology research firm, data is more than doubling every two years, so the amount of data available to organizations is skyrocketing. The next frontier will be data derived from the Internet of Things (IoT). Making sense out of big data quickly is critical in order to gain a market advantage.

Marketers are interested in big data because it can be mined for patterns of consumer behavior and contain more interesting anomalies than smaller data sets, with the potential to provide new insights into customer behavior, weather patterns, financial market activity, or other phenomena. For instance, Evrythng, an IoT platform company, is partnering with Trueffect, a digital ad firm, to develop ways that marketers can use data generated by connected appliances and other devices to directly communicate with and target advertising with consumers. However, to derive business value from this data, organizations need new technologies and analytic tools capable of managing and analyzing nontraditional data along with their traditional enterprise data.