2^nd Screen Summit: Rapid Growth of ‘Big Data' Can Increase Consumer Engagement

Dell's Stack outlines strategies for monetizing, marketing metrics from mobile devices

By B&C Staff -- Broadcasting & Cable, 6/27/2012 8:35:16 PM

New York -- With consumers engaging with content on more devices than ever, companies are also gaining more metrics on their customers than ever before, which can be used to more effectively monetize, market and learn about their needs, said Debi Stack, director of industry consulting, telecom, media, entertainment, sports & hospitality at Dell at the 2^nd Screen Summit here Wednesday.

At the event, which was co-sponsored by B&C and Multichannel News, Stack gave a presentation to attendees about how to use data gathered from second screen devices -- expected to grow 650% over the next five years -- to deliver contextually aware information.

"Data can be aggregated and analyzed to help U.S. content providers deliver the right content and the right advertising in way consumer enjoys, so they don't consider it spam," she said.

Stack gave the example of sports leagues being interested in so-called "big data" to know who is buying their tickets and using second screen devices in the stadiums to integrate their customer relationship management systems, point of sale systems and ticketing systems to engage fans to buy tickets to the next game or pre-order concessions, for instance.

"Not only know who our audience is and what they're interested in, but we know where they are with location-based services and we can begin to do predictive analytics," she said.

The challenge with data gleaned from second screen devices is of course privacy, though Stack said that there is both personally identifiable information and anonymous information.

"With the proper data analytics, you can aggregate both and you can annonimize [sic.] the data and you can profile the consumers so then you can go back and target based on profile but not on personally identifiable information," she said.