Welcome to the World of Big Data—Connecting Mobile Behavior with Transactional Data

NEW YORK, NY — Web-enabled mobile devices are making it possible for people to have constant access to content regardless of time and location, and this ease of access is drastically altering media consumption patterns. These changes to consumer behavior have become so significant that ComScore’s latest research coined a new phrase to describe it: The Digital Omnivore.

According to ComScore’s 2012 US Digital Futures In Focus report, in 2011, the majority of all mobile phone owners consumed mobile content on their devices, marking an important milestone in the evolution of mobile from a primary communications device to a content consumption tool. While this transition marks a major shift in consumer behavior, it doesn’t tell the whole story. People aren’t just consuming media, they’re also tracking and storing information across multiple channels that include social, news, finance, daily deals, reviews, and more, making smartphones more than just mobile devices—they’ve become an extension of our cognitive system.

As people navigate through their day, they’re also leaving behind massive amounts of digital information. Every online and offline touchpoint generates additional transactional data about a consumer’s preferences and purchase behavior. Until recently, it has been very difficult and cost prohibitive to extract actionable information from these transactions because much of this data was either unstructured and therefore inaccessible, or it resides in proprietary databases. This untapped ocean of information is called “big data” and connecting and utilizing it is becoming of critical importance. The concept behind big data stems from the vast amount of information that’s housed in data sets, the size of which is beyond the ability of basic software tools to capture, manage, and process. Thanks to technological advances such as parallel processing, this information is becoming more accessible, opening up a new world of possibilities for marketers to engage with consumers with greater relevancy.

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