Category Archives: Insights

With thrill seekers returning to theme parks in droves, organizations such as Walt Disney World and Six Flags are gearing up for an influx of visitors during the summer months.  One of the most pressing problems these and other theme parks are facing is how to maintain the customer experience while providing an even tighter level of security – and that’s where big data can now play a significant role.

Securing public events and entertainment venues took on an even more pressing urgency after explosions rocked this year’s Boston Marathon.  It came as a surprise to some just how much data was available and could be gleaned from attendees’ cell phones and facial recognition software, to name a few sources.

Big data, or the massive amount of unstructured information, can be sifted and leveraged to unobtrusively protect the public despite a venue’s size.   (As a typical example, Busch Gardens Tampa Bay is 335 acres.)  Designing a platform that can provide the best analytics for security purposes comes with challenges, however, that include the question of how to unify the myriad sources used to collect the data.  These range from video camera surveillance to monitoring social media chatter on sites such as FourSquare and Twitter.

As an example, one of the ways big data analytics is being used within the theme park setting is to track a person of interest.  Once identified, real-time video, audio and social network feeds can be used to monitor any visitor; that person is then scored within an analytics program to determine the probability of the threat he or she poses so that security personnel can be more effectively deployed.  This helps the theme park better focus its staff resources on those posing the greatest threat potential.

Walt Disney Co., always a step ahead, recently announced that it would take the collection of data for security purposes to the next level.  It plans to evolve data collection into a continuous stream of information on every visitor received via an RFID bracelet that tracks each purchase, monitors every ride and can be used to suggest activities of interest.  The Mouse says this will help maximize customer satisfaction (by minimizing wait times and suggesting next rides and food choices).

It could be a game-changing move for the entertainment organization, bringing everything from guaranteed ride times to cartoon characters that greet children by name.  But it also delivers the next phase of security: the ability to pinpoint the location of any visitor within the park at any given time, thanks to the RFID chip.  And with this innovation comes more unstructured data than an entertainment venue has ever generated, collected and analyzed.

Even though big data, and to a lesser extent predictive analytics, are topics that have been overhyped, there is little argument that both are fueling a sea change in, of all places, enterprise marketing.  The new challenges facing the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) are at the core of the change:  building better customer relationships, managing game-changing factors such as social networks, mobile access and the utilization of big data to measure any and all marketing efforts.

As a result, some industry analysts such as Gartner Group are predicting that CMOs will increasingly make technology purchase decisions.  As more CMOs are tasked with ensuring that technology purchases align with revenue-driving initiatives, a new class of service providers will emerge: people that understand and can integrate technology and marketing.

Obviously, the days are gone when a CMO could spend millions on an ad campaign and not have to answer the ROI question.  With growing budgets comes the responsibility to report results. The ability to infer a cause of a sale is one of the most — if not the most — valid methodology for determining the value of any marketing campaign.  Knowing which marketing channel contributed more to revenue is one area where quantitative methods and big data can provide the answer.

Against this backdrop, Gartner maps out the future of the marketing technology ecosystem with both traditional players and an emergent set of new participants that appeal to the CMO/IT purchaser by offering an understanding of marketing and technology.

So what type of technology will the CMO/IT purchaser most likely acquire?  Big data and analytics play key roles in all of the major players.  Gartner’s Laura McLellan, who has predicted that the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017, points to CRM, digital marketing and database marketing technologies, customer analytics and mobile marketing technologies as a few of the solutions that will surge in popularity.

The emergent class of marketing business service brokers will provide many of the above marketing services, in part or in whole, and may offer services in the cloud as well.  Solutions will also look beyond structured data (relational databases, spreadsheets, etc.) and unstructured data (tweets, online posts, reviews, and even video, image and audio).

Going forward, as buyers, CMOs will need to understand what service providers and integrators offer.   Service brokers will need to consider the risks versus rewards: staying with business as usual and bypassing internal IT to get to the business buyer, or acting as a bridge between the CMO and CIO.