funded with support from the European Commission. The author is solely responsible for this publication (communication) and the Commission accepts no responsibility for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. The objective of this module is to provide an overview of the basic information on big and smart data. Upon completion of this module you will: - Comprehend the emerging role of big data - Understand the key terms regarding big and smart data - Know how big data can be turned into smart data - Be able to apply the key terms regarding big and smart data Duration of the module: approximately 1 – 2 hours Module 1. Introduction to Big and Smart Data
V‘s of data 2 How does big data become smart data? 3 Smart Data Smart Region | www.smartdata.how This programme has been funded with support from the European Commission. The author is solely responsible for this publication (communication) and the Commission accepts no responsibility for any use that may be made of the information contained therein. – A Brief History of Data – What is Big Data? – Sources of Data – The Importance of Big Data – Turning Big Data into Value – Smart Data Applications – How to Start Smart? – Big Data Challenges 4 Study case – How Target used the Power of Big Data
DATA Long before computers (as we know them today) were commonplace, the idea that we were creating an ever- expanding body of knowledge ripe for analysis was popular in academia. Although it might be easy to forget, our increasing ability to store and analyze information has been a gradual evolution – although things certainly sped up at the end of the last century, with the invention of digital storage and the internet. Before we dive into the Module 1 it is neccessary to look at the long history of thought and innovation which have led us to the dawn of the data age.
storing and analyzing data are the tally sticks. The Ishango Bone was discovered in 1960 and is thought to be one of the earliest pieces of evidence of prehistoric data storage. Notches were marked into sticks or bones, to keep track of trading activity or supplies. They would compare sticks and notches to carry out rudimentary calculations, enabling them to make predictions such as how long their food supplies would last. C 2400 BCE The abacus – the first dedicated device constructed specifically for performing calculations – comes into use in Babylon. The first libraries also appeared around this time, representing our first attempts at mass data storage. 300 BC – 48 AD The Library of Alexandria is perhaps the largest collection of data in the ancient world, housing up to half a million scrolls and covering everything we had learned so far. Unfortunately it has been destroyed by the invading Romans in 48AD . Contrary to common myth, not everything was lost – significant parts of the library’s collections were moved to other buildings in the city, or stolen and dispersed throughout the ancient world. C 100 – 200 AD The Antikythera Mechanism, the earliest discovered mechanical computer, is produced, presumably by Greek scientists. It’s “CPU” consists of 30 interlocking bronze gears and it is thought to have been designed for astrological purposes and tracking the cycle of Olympic Games. Its design suggests it is probably an evolution of an earlier device – but these so far remain undiscovered. Ancient History of Data
experiment in statistical data analysis. By recording information about mortality, he theorized that he can design an early warning system for the bubonic plague ravaging Europe. 1865 The term “business intelligence” is used by Richard Millar Devens in his Encyclopedia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes, describing how the banker Henry Furnese achieved an advantage over competitors by collecting and analyzing information relevant to his business activities in a structured manner. This is thought to be the first study of a business putting data analysis to use for commercial purposes. 1880 The US Census Bureau has a problem – it estimates that it will take it 8 years to crunch all the data collected in the 1880 census, and it is predicted that the data generated by the 1890 census will take over 10 years, meaning it will not even be ready to look at until it is outdated by the 1900 census. In 1881 a young engineer employed by the bureau – Herman Hollerith – produces what will become known as the Hollerith Tabulating Machine. Using punch cards, he reduces 10 years’ work to three months and achieves his place in history as the father of modern automated computation. The company he founds will go on to become known as IBM. The Emergence of Statistics
when wireless technology is “perfectly applied the whole Earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole … and the instruments through which we shall be able to do this will be amazingly simple compared to our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.” 1928 Fritz Pfleumer, a German-Austrian engineer, invents a method of storing information magnetically on tape. The principles he develops are still in use today, with the vast majority of digital data being stored magnetically on computer hard disks. 1944 Fremont Rider, librarian at Wesleyan University, Connecticut, US, published a paper titled The Scholar and the Future of the Research Library. In one of the earliest attempts to quantify the amount of information being produced, he observes that in order to store all the academic and popular works of value being produced, American libraries would have to double their capacity every 16 years. This led him to speculate that the Yale Library, by 2040, will contain 200 million books spread over 6,000 miles of shelves. The Early Days of Modern Data Storage
“the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal.” 1962 The first steps are taken towards speech recognition, when IBM engineer William C Dersch presents the Shoebox Machine at the 1962 World Fair. It can interpret numbers and sixteen words spoken in the English language into digital information. 1964 An article in the New Statesman refers to the difficulty in managing the increasing amount of information becoming available. The Beginnings of Business Intelligence The Start of Large Data Centers 1970 IBM mathematician Edgar F Codd presents his framework for a “relational database”. The model provides the framework that many modern data services use today, to store information in a hierarchical format, which can be accessed by anyone who knows what they are looking for. 1976 Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems are becoming more commonly used across the business world, representing one of the first mainstream commercial uses of computers to speed up everyday processes and make efficiencies. 1989 Possibly the first use of the term Big Data in the way it is used today. International best-selling author Erik Larson pens an article for Harpers Magazine speculating on the origin of the junk mail he receives. He writes: “The keepers of big data say they are doing it for the consumer’s benefit. But data have a way of being used for purposes other originally intended.”
would become the Internet as we know it today. In a post in the Usenet group alt.hypertext he sets out the specifications for a worldwide, interconnected web of data, accessible to anyone from anywhere. 1996 According to R J T Morris and B J Truskowski in their 2003 book The Evolution of Storage Systems, this is the point where digital storage became more cost effective than paper. 1997 Michael Lesk publishes his paper How Much Information is there in the World? Theorizing that the existence of 12,000 petabytes is “perhaps not an unreasonable guess”. He also points out that even at this early point in its development, the web is increasing in size 10-fold each year. Much of this data, he points out, will never be seen by anyone and therefore yield no insight. Google Search also debuts this year – and for the next 20 years (at least) its name will become shorthand for searching the internet for data. The Emergence of the Internet Early Ideas of Big Data 1999 A couple of years later and the term Big Data appears in Visually Exploring Gigabyte Datasets in Real Time, published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Again the propensity for storing large amounts of data with no way of adequately analyzing it is lamented. The paper goes on to quote computing pioneer Richard W Hamming as saying: “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.” Also possibly first use of the term “Internet of Things”, to describe the growing number of devices online and the potential for them to communicate with each other, often without a human “middle man”.
(now chief economist at Google) attempted to quantify the amount of digital information in the world, and its rate of growth, for the first time. They concluded: “The world’s total yearly production of print, film, optical and magnetic content would require roughly 1.5 billion gigabytes of storage. This is the equivalent of 250 megabytes per person for each man, woman and child on Earth.” Early Ideas of Big Data Web 2.0 Increases Data Volumes 2005 Commentators announce that we are witnessing the birth of “Web 2.0” – the user-generated web where the majority of content will be provided by users of services, rather than the service providers themselves. This is achieved through integration of traditional HTML-style web pages with vast back-end databases built on SQL. 5.5 million people are already using Facebook, launched a year earlier, to upload and share their own data with friends. This year also sees the creation of Hadoop – the open source framework created specifically for storage and analysis of Big Data sets. Its flexibility makes it particularly useful for managing the unstructured data (voice, video, raw text etc) which we are increasingly generating and collecting. 2001 In his paper 3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity and Variety Doug Laney, analyst at Gartner, defines three of what will come to be the commonly-accepted characteristics of Big Data. This year also see the first use of the term “software as a service” – a concept fundamental to many of the cloud-based applications which are industry-standard today – in the article Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service by the Software and Information Industry Association.
of information – equivalent to 12 gigabytes of information per person, per day), according to the How Much Information? 2010 report. In International Production and Dissemination of Information, it is estimated that 14.7 exabyte's of new information are produced this year. Today’s Use of the Term ‘Big Data’ Emerges 2010 Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, tells a conference that as much data is now being created every two days, as was created from the beginning of human civilization to the year 2003. 2009 The average US company with over 1,000 employees is storing more than 200 terabytes of data according to the report Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition and Productivity by McKinsey Global Institute. 2011 The McKinsey report states that by 2018 the US will face a shortfall of between 140,000 and 190,000 professional data scientists, and states that issues including privacy, security and intellectual property will have to be resolved before the full value of Big Data will be realized. 2015 Google is the largest big data company in the world that stores 10 billion gigabytes of data and processes approximately 3.5 billion requests every day. Amazon is the company with the most number of servers-the 1,000,000,000 gigabytes of big data produced by Amazon from its 152 million customers is stored on more than 1,400,000 servers in various data centres.
have implications for everyone, whether we want it or not. Big data is one of those things, and it is completely transforming the way we do business and is impacting most other parts of our lives. The basic idea behind the phrase „Big Data“ is that everything we do is increasingly leaving a digital trace, which we can use and analyse. Big Data therefore refers to our ability to make use of the everincreasing volumes of data. WHAT IS BIG DATA? Smart Data Smart Region | www.smartdata.how „Data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its manipulation and management present significant logistical challenges.“ Oxford English Dictionary, 2013
characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or mechanical recording media’, as a quick google search would show. The concept of Big Data is nothing complex; as the name suggests, “Big Data” refers to copious amounts of data which are too large to be processed and analyzed by traditional tools, and the data is not stored or managed efficiently. Since the amount of Big Data increases exponentially- more than 500 terabytes of data are uploaded to Face book alone, in a single day- it represents a real problem in terms of analysis. However, there is also huge potential in the analysis of Big Data. The proper management and study of this data can help companies make better decisions based on usage statistics and user interests, thereby helping their growth. Some companies have even come up with new products and services, based on feedback received from Big Data analysis opportunities. Classification is essential for the study of any subject. So Big Data is widely classified into three main types, which are: SEMI- STRUCTURED DATA CLASSIFICATION OF DATA 1 2 3
the data which is already stored in databases, in an ordered manner. It accounts for about 20% of the total existing data, and is used the most in programming and computer-related activities. There are two sources of structured data- machines and humans. All the data received from sensors, web logs and financial systems are classified under machine-generated data. These include medical devices, GPS data, data of usage statistics captured by servers and applications and the huge amount of data that usually move through trading platforms, to name a few. Human-generated structured data mainly includes all the data a human input into a computer, such as his name and other personal details. When a person clicks a link on the internet, or even makes a move in a game, data is created- this can be used by companies to figure out their customer behavior and make the appropriate decisions and modifications. Example of Structured Data An 'Employee' table in a database is an example of Structured Data. Employee_ID Employee_Name Gender Department Salary_In_Euros 2365 Rajesh Kulkarni Male Finance 65000 3398 Pratibha Joshi Female Admin 65000 7465 Shushil Roy Male Admin 50000 7500 Shubhojit Das Male Finance 50000 7699 Priya Sane Female Finance 55000
row-column databases, unstructured data is the opposite- they have no clear format in storage. The rest of the data created, about 80% of the total account for unstructured big data. Most of the data a person encounters belongs to this category- and until recently, there was not much to do to it except storing it or analyzing it manually. Unstructured data is also classified based on its source, into machine-generated or human-generated. Machine-generated data accounts for all the satellite images, the scientific data from various experiments and radar data captured by various facets of technology. Human-generated unstructured data is found in abundance across the internet, since it includes social media data, mobile data and website content. This means that the pictures we upload to out Facebook or Instagram handles, the videos we watch on YouTube and even the text messages we send all contribute to the gigantic heap that is unstructured data. Example of Unstructured Data Output returned by 'Google Search‚.
semi-structured data has always been unclear, since most of the semi-structured data appear to be unstructured at a glance. Information that is not in the traditional database format as structured data, but contain some organizational properties which make it easier to process, are included in semi-structured data. For example, NoSQL documents are considered to be semi-structured, since they contain keywords that can be used to process the document easily. An email message is one example of semi-structured data. It includes well-defined data fields in the header such as sender, recipient, and so on, while the actual body of The Path to Hyperconverged Infrastructure for the Enterprise the message is unstructured. If you wanted to find out who is emailing whom and when (information contained in the header), a relational database might be a good choice. But if you’re more interested in the message content, big data tools, such as natural language processing, will be a better ft. Example of Semi-structured Data Personal data stored in a XML file.
data is often boiled down to a few varieties including social data, machine data, and transactional data. Machine data consists of information generated from industrial equipment, real-time data from sensors that track parts and monitor machinery (often also called the Internet of Things), and even web logs that track user behavior online. At arcplan client CERN, the largest particle physics research center in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates 40 terabytes of data every second during experiments. Regarding transactional data, large retailers and even B2B companies can generate multitudes of data on a regular basis considering that their transactions consist of one or many items, product IDs, prices, payment information, manufacturer and distributor data, and much more. Social media data is providing remarkable insights to companies on consumer behavior and sentiment that can be integrated with CRM data for analysis, with 230 million tweets posted on Twitter per day, 2.7 billion Likes and comments added to Facebook every day, and 60 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute (this is what we mean by velocity of data).
Networking and Media Big data is all the huge unstructured data generated from social networks from a wide array of sources ranging from Social media ‘Likes’, ‘Tweets, blog posts, comments, videos and forum messages etc. Just to give you some information, Google in any given day processes about 24 petabytes of data. For your information, most of the data is not arranged in rows and columns. Big data also takes into account real time information from RFIDs and all kinds of sensors. The social intelligence that can be gleaned from data of this magnitude is tremendous. Professionals and technologists from organizations in the enterprise and consumer social networks have begun to realize the potential value of the data that is generated through social conversations. Sometimes Big data is also often known as ‘bound’ data and ‘Unbound’ data. Social networks have a geometric growth pattern. Big data technologies and applications should have the ability to scale and analyze this large unstructured data. It should have the capability to analyze in real time as it happens. Social media conversations generate lot of context to the information. Such context is an invaluable resource for knowledge and expertise sharing. Context in conversations is key to a social network’s success. It is not an easy task to analyze millions of conversational messages every day. This is where traditional analytics can help mainstream Big data analysis and both need to go hand in hand.
E-mail users send 204,000,000 messages YouTube users upload 4,320 minutes of new videos. Google recieves over 4,000,000 search queries. Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content. Twitter users tweet 277,000 times. Amazon makes 83,000$ in online sales. Instagram users post 216,000 new photos. Skype users connect for 23,300 hours. SM Examples
It is created by everything from planes and elevators to traffic lights and fitness-monitoring devices. It intersects with and improves human lives in countless ways every day. Such data became more prevalent as technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) and telematics advanced. More recently, machine data has gained further attention as use of the Internet of Things, Hadoop and other big data management technologies has grown. Application, server and business process logs, call detail records and sensor data are prime examples of machine data. Internet clickstream data and website activity logs also factor into discussions of machine data. Combining machine data with other enterprise data types for analysis is expected to provide new views and insight on business activities and operations. For example, some large industrial manufacturers are analyzing machine data on the performance of field equipment in near-real-time, together with historical performance data, to better understand service problems and to try to predict equipment maintenance issues before machines break down. Machine-generated data is the lifeblood of the Internet of Things (IoT). Smart Data Smart Region | www.smartdata.how
result of transactions. Unlike other sorts of data, transactional data contains a time dimension which means that there is timeliness to it and over time, it becomes less relevant. Rather than being the object of transactions like the product being purchased or the identity of the customer, it is more of a reference data describing the time, place, prices, payment methods, discount values, and quantities related to that particular transaction, usually at the point of sale. Purchases Returns Invoices Payments Credits Donations Trades Dividends Contracts Interest Payroll Lending Reservations Signups Subscriptions Examples of transactional data
DATA The importance of big data does not revolve around how much data a company has but how a company utilizes the collected data. Every company uses data in its own way; the more efficiently a company uses its data, the more potential it has to grow. The company can take data from any source and analyze it to find answers which will enable: Cost Savings Some tools of Big Data can bring cost advantages to business when large amounts of data are to be stored and these tools also help in identifying more efficient ways of doing business. Time Reductions The high speed of tools and in-memory analytics can easily identify new sources of data which helps businesses analyzing data immediately and make quick decisions based on the learnings. New Product Development By knowing the trends of customer needs and satisfaction through analytics you can create products according to the wants of customers. Understanding the Market Conditions By analyzing big data you can get a better understanding of current market conditions. For example, by analyzing customers’ purchasing behaviors, a company can find out the products that are sold the most and produce products according to this trend. Control Online Reputation Big data tools can do sentiment analysis. Therefore, you can get feedback about who is saying what about your company. If you want to monitor and improve the online presence of your business, then, big data tools can help in all this.
Volume Velocity Variety Veracity Value The magnitude of the data being generated. The speed at which data is being generated and aggregated. The different types of data. The trustworthiness of the data in terms of accuracy in quality. The economic value of the data. 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last 2 years alone. Literally the speed of light! Data doubles every 40 months. Structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Because of the anonimity of the Internet or possibly false identities, the reliability of data is often in question. Having access to big data is no good unless we can turn it into value. Big Data does a pretty good job of telling us what happened, but not why it happened or what to do about it. The 5 V‘s represent specific characteristics and properties that can help us understand both the challenges and advantages of big data initiatives.
Volume The magnitude of the data being generated. Velocity The speed at which data is being generated and aggregated. Variety The different types of data. Veracity The trustworthiness of the data in terms of accuracy in quality. Value The economic value of the data. Big Data does a pretty good job of telling us what happened, but not why it happened or what to do about it. The 5 V‘s represent specific characteristics and properties that can help us understand both the challenges and advantages of big data initiatives.
every second. Just think of all the emails, twitter messages, photos, video clips, sensor data etc. we produce and share every second. We are not talking Terabytes but Zettabytes or Brontobytes. On Facebook alone we send 10 billion messages per day, click the "like' button 4.5 billion times and upload 350 million new pictures each and every day. If we take all the data generated in the world between the beginning of time and 2008, the same amount of data will soon be generated every minute! This increasingly makes data sets too large to store and analyse using traditional database technology. With big data technology we can now store and use these data sets with the help of distributed systems, where parts of the data is stored in different locations and brought together by software.
is generated and the speed at which data moves around. Just think of social media messages going viral in seconds, the speed at which credit card transactions are checked for fraudulent activities, or the milliseconds it takes trading systems to analyse social media networks to pick up signals that trigger decisions to buy or sell shares. Big data technology allows us now to analyse the data while it is being generated, without ever putting it into databases.
can now use. In the past we focused on structured data that neatly fits into tables or relational databases, such as financial data (e.g. sales by product or region). In fact, 80% of the world’s data is now unstructured, and therefore can’t easily be put into tables (think of photos, video sequences or social media updates). With big data technology we can now harness differed types of data (structured and unstructured) including messages, social media conversations, photos, sensor data, video or voice recordings and bring them together with more traditional, structured data.
data. With many forms of big data, quality and accuracy are less controllable (just think of Twitter posts with hash tags, abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech as well as the reliability and accuracy of content) but big data and analytics technology now allows us to work with these type of data. The volumes often make up for the lack of quality or accuracy.
account when looking at Big Data: Value! It is all well and good having access to big data but unless we can turn it into value it is useless. So you can safely argue that 'value' is the most important V of Big Data. It is important that businesses make a business case for any attempt to collect and leverage big data. It is so easy to fall into the buzz trap and embark on big data initiatives without a clear understanding of costs and benefits. Big data can deliver value in almost any area of business or society: ✓ It helps companies to better understand and serve customers: Examples include the recommendations made by Amazon or Netflix. ✓ It allows companies to optimize their processes: Uber is able to predict demand, dynamically price journeys and send the closest driver to the customers. ✓ It improves our health care: Government agencies can now predict flu outbreaks and track them in real time and pharmaceutical companies are able to use big data analytics to fast-track drug development. ✓ It helps us to improve security: Government and law enforcement agencies use big data to foil terrorist attacks and detect cyber crime. ✓ It allows sport stars to boost their performance: Sensors in balls, cameras on the pitch and GPS trackers on their clothes allow athletes to analyze and improve upon what they do.
VALUE Smart data describes data that has valid, well-defined, meaningful information that can expedite information processing. The „Datafication“ of our World: • Activities • Conversations • Words • Voice • Social Media • Browser logs • Photos • Videos • Sensors • Etc. Analysing Big Data: • Text analytics • Sentitment analysis • Face recognition • Voice analytics • Etc. VOLUME VELOCITY VARIETY VERACITY The „Datafication“ of our world gives us unprecedeted amounts of data in terms of volume, velocity, variety and veracity. The latest technology such as cloud computing and distributed systems together with the latest software and analysis approaches allow us to leverage all types of data to gain insights and add value. VALUE SMART DATA
• Real time pricing • Product placement • Micro-targeted advertising • Monitor patient visits • Patient care and safety • Reduce readmittance rates • Smart meter-stream analysis • Proactive equipment repair • Power and consuption matching • Cell tower diagnostics • Bandwidth allocation • Proactive maintenance • Decreasing time to market • Supply planning • Increasing product quality • Network intrusion detection and prevention • Disease outbreak detection • Unsafe driving detection and monitoring • Route and time planning for public transport FINANCIAL SERVICES RETAIL TELECOM MANUFACTURING HEALTHCARE UTILITIES, OIL & GAS PUBLIC SECTOR TRANSPORTATION Every business in the world needs data to thrive. Data is what tells you who your customers are and how they operate, and it’s what can guide you to new insights and new innovations. Any business can benefit from using big data to learn more about their strategic position and development potential, but in order of not „drowning“ in big data it is neccessary to find the right area of interest first. Smart Data Smart Region | www.smartdata.how
Even though data analysis and visualization tools have come a long way in the past decade, big data analysis still relies on human intervention and coordination to be successful. You need to know how to ask the right questions, how to eliminate your own bias, and how to form actionable insights rather than basic conclusions. 1. Review your data. • What data do you have? • How is it used? • Do you have the expertise to manage your data? 2. Ask the right questions. • What data do you have and how is it used? • Are you being specific enough? 3. Draw the conclusions. • Could an expert help to sense-check your results? • Can you validate your hypotheses? • What further data do you need?
requires a sophisticated team of developers, data scientists and analysts who also have a sufficient amount of domain knowledge to identify valuable insights. Smart Data Smart Region | www.smartdata.how BIG DATA CHALLENGES It‘s easy to get caught up in the hype and opportunity of big data. However, one of the reasons big data is so underutilized is because big data and big data technologies also present many challenges. One survey found that 55% of big data projects are never completed. So what‘s the problem with big data? SCALABILITY Many organizations fail to take into account how quickly a big data project can grow and evolve. Big data workloads also tend to be bursty, making it difficult to allocate capacity for resources. ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS A key challenge for data science teams is to identify a clear business objective and the appropriate data sources to collect and analyze to meet that objective. DATA QUALITY Common causes of dirty data include: user imput errors, duplicate data and incorrect data linking. SECURITY Specific challenges include: - User authentication for every team and team member accessing the data - Restricting access based on a user‘s need - Recording data access histories and meeting other comliance regulations - proper use of encryprion on data in-transit and at rest COST MANAGEMENT Businesses pursuing big data projects must remember the cost of training, maintenance and expansion
are several things you notice almost immediately when you start dealing with big data. One thing that is decidedly different is the amount of open source software in wide use. Many of the tools you hear the most about, such as Hadoop, are open source. Open source is a good way to foster rapid innovation in a rapidly evolving field. As a corollary to that you’ll notice that there are a vast number of big data tools from which to choose. In addition to strictly open source offerings, well-known systems vendors such as IBM, HP, Oracle, and Dell have products for the big data market. Many of these combine open source tools and proprietary solutions. Major cloud providers including Amazon and Google provide big data services in the cloud—often using versions of open source tools. There are hundreds of big data tools and services, next slide will show you just a peek into them. Big data platform generally consists of big data storage, servers, database, big data management, business intelligence and other big data management utilities. It also supports custom development, querying and integration with other systems.
THE BACKGROUND Every time you go shopping, you share intimate details about your consumption patterns with retailers. And many of those retailers are studying those details to figure out what you like, what you need, and which coupons are most likely to make you happy. Target, for example, has figured out how to data-mine its way into womens‘ womb, to figure out whether they had baby on the way long before they needed to start buying diapers. THE SOURCE OF TARGET‘S BIG DATA Target assigns every customer a Guest ID number, tied to their credit card, name, or email address that becomes a bucket that stores a history of everything they've bought and any demographic information Target has collected from them or bought from other sources. Using that, their analyst looked at historical buying data for all the ladies who had signed up for Target baby registries in the past. THE BIG BIG DATA CONCLUSION Analyst ran test after test, analyzing the data, and before long some useful patterns emerged. Lotions, for example. Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. THE REACTION So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote -- so good that it sounds made up -- that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager: THE CHALLENGE What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance. THE SOLUTION Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and childrens books, they more subtly spread them about: They found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs.
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