Is big data too big for digital marketing?

The topic "big data" is present. CEOs talk about it in interviews, scholars are thinking of ways and algorithms on how to best use it and consultancies start to shape their recommendations around its usage. An article of the WSJ on big data goes so far to create new job titles like "big data scientists". A business function which is especially affeted by big data and can gain a lot from it, is digital marketing. But are digital marketers really ready to use big data, and what is required to use big data approprietly?

What companies get wrong

Collecting instead of crunching: According to David Edelman, a partner at McKinsey and Co. and co-leader of McKinsey's digital marketing practice, too many firms still believe that big data is more about how to collect the data, rather than how to analyze it.
I agree and think this dream of companies of having a fully integrated customer-data warehouse and being able to perform some simple data requests to get the answers just doesn't work. Instead, firms should focus more on formulating the right questions and problems to solve and then think about how to collect the data a lightweight way to find the answers. Companies need to realize that it is very unlikely to find big new insights by just going on a "discovery walk" trough terabytes of data.

Testing too little: David Edelman says in his article about mastering digital marketing that he observes so many companies which complain about not having the budget to test many new marketing approaches developed from their big data analysis. Reason being that marketing executives are too eager to roll out new findings directly to the whole market. Rather, companies should test their ideas in small-scale pilots and test many different findings. Running a big data analysis per se doesn't guarantee that the solution will work in the market.

The way to go

I think the word big data still scares too many marketing people. In fact, big data stands for nothing else than "better and more data access / better data collection possibilities" and does not deliver automatically new insights and revolutionary ideas. Executives still need to think by themselves and define what they actually want to solve for and which questions they want to have answered by the data. Only then they can go and either collect or ask "big data" to find the answer. If this mind shift happens and companies furthermore stop believing that every finding out of a "big data dataset" is a good one, I believe digital marketers will be very successful in the future in leveraging all this data which is out there in the cyber world.