ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°149 - Juillet/Août 2013 - 20

FoCus

By Amaury de BUCHET (93)

Data is gold
If data is the gold of the 21st century, then the gold rush
has started... tells Amaury de BUCHET, founder of
Greenspace Paris, entrepreneurs residence and
coworking, and affiliate professor in innovation
and entrepreneurship at ESCP Europe.

Since 2009 with the apparition of the «zettabyte»
word (1 billion terabytes), Google, EMC, IBM or
Criteo have started to appear on TV and magazine covers with such catchy titles. Some mine
and refine this new gold, and, like for the gold
rush, some specialize in providing services to the
«twenty O’niners». McKinsey in May 2011 made
some bold promises: «a retailer using big data to
the full has the potential to increase its operating
margin by more than 60%», «administration could
save more than €100 billion in operational efficiency». In face of a crisis, this sounds too good to
be true/left aside!

Gold rush: the data trails
The saloons of the Paris Data Trail: Data Tuesday, DataGeeks,
and Datapero.
The shovels and picks of the data age: crawlers, machine
learning algorithms, Hadoop MapReduce, and NoSQL.
The gold fields: health, transport and retail sectors, as well
urban planning and environment.

But the key issue is the original source of all this
data: user behaviour. We knew how to collect
and treat vast amounts of historical data, but now
we can do it with real-time and prediction data.
A software from US defence giant Raytheon can
predict where riots will take place, how many will
be there,… Another from Xerox can predict where
you will most probably find available parking places in Los Angeles 40 mn in advance.
An enormous potential
The potential is enormous for all: end-users, companies, local government, the society as a whole. I
will just focus on 2 angles:
1. Market research
Consumer knowledge is key for marketing exe-

- ESCP Europe Magazine N° 149 - Juillet/Août 2013

cutives, the main clients of big data initiatives
(not CIOs!). It can improve the performance of
campaigns, and help developing entirely new products and services. A typical marketing approach
solves a business issue (market share) by translating it into a marketing issue (packaging) and
then trying to test hypothesis through a carefully
designed market research (shape). A cascade of
hunches, often based on reproducing traditional
schemes, its limit is the identification and selection of hypothesis. With big data you can identify
many more of them, unconventional and counterintuitive, and test them quickly against a vast data
set. Such approaches are already available to all:
eg. Google Think Insights can suggest keywords
that have the highest correlation factor with words
you search for…
2. Privacy
Most of those data are traces of digital activities
(geolocalization, transactions, page views) the
consumer believes can not be linked together.
This is no longer true. Just a few years ago was
invented online retargeting, behavioural marketing
based on historical data (products you’d looked
at and did not purchase). This now includes predictive/probabilistic data. You may have heard
last year about Target’s vouchers for baby items
sent to women based on a «pregnancy prediction
score». One reached a family whose father was
not aware of the pregnancy of his daughter in high
school…
This opens many difficult questions, among
which:
- should we tax the collection and processing of
data?
- what skills need the future marketer possess?
- who can act as trusted third party to control the
use of personal data?
- are some data more dangerous than others?
Properly secured?
●

Table des matières de la publication ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°149 - Juillet/Août 2013

Couverture
Zapping
Sommaire
BUSINESS
Personnalités du mois Cyril ZIMMERMANN (94) : Un avenir prometteur
Focus
L'appel du numérique
E-learning
Innovation, innovation…
Data is gold
Speed and risk
La fin du e-commerce
Photo réussie !
Managing queues
A win-win situation
The fabulous box
A gateway to Brazil
Itinéraires
Changez vos ampoules !
Grands crus
Manger bon, frais et sain
Entretiens
Maroc
Nouvelles technologies
Cloud
NEWS
Vie du réseau
Etienne PREVOST (MSE 94), Directeur du Who's Who in France
Nominations
Alumni Forum 2013
Groupe Centre
Groupe ESCP Europe au Féminin
Groupe Normandie
Groupe Seniors Actifs
Premier week-end de ski
Agenda/Carnet
À lire
Carrière
Réseaux sociaux, nouvel outil de votre carrière
Managing people remotely
Voyages En voiture !
CAMPUS
École Launching a business in the digital area
Fondation Soutenir les nouvelles générations
Vie étudiante
Toutes voiles dehors !
Changeons nous-mêmes l'éducation !
Let's celebrate curiosity!

ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°149 - Juillet/Août 2013