Mega Trends in the Data Industry
Excited to have been able to connect with The Corporate Data Show led by Rick Holmes, Founder of Every Market Media.
Tune in as we talk Big Data, Strategy, and learn about Think Data Group’s new Periodic Table of Data Elements! See the full transcript below.
Welcome to the Corporate Data Show. A podcast dedicated to helping marketing professionals leverage data to generate revenue. Whether you’re looking for techniques and strategies or tools and resources, you’ve come to the right place. Now for our host and CEO of Every Market Media. Rick Holmes.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Welcome back to the Corporate Data Show, friends. I’m Rick Holmes, your host, and with me today are some exciting guests, Barry Gold and Mike Valant of Think Data Group. How are you fellas today?
Mike Valant:
Great.
Barry Gold:
Doing great. Yeah. Happy to be here with you, Rick. Thank you.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Yep. So we’ve got you on the show today. I guess first let’s talk about what… For anybody who is not following what Think Data Group does. Now, I know you were formerly with Venture Development Corp; they got bought. So you got your own shingle. Tell us a little more.
Barry Gold:
So, based on my years of experience, put together a business model, an advisory firm that is supporting clients’ data strategy, data sourcing, data product development, and most importantly, how to make money from data.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Cool. Cool. Yeah. There’s so much stuff out there that you’re drinking from a fire hose. I mean the existence of data exchanges in the first place, which are probably not the most efficient way even to get data to people, but that certainly speaks volumes. I feel like a lot of the reason people buy our stuff even is the specialty consulting level integration info they get about our particular type of data. Cool. And is that a little different focused than VDC or did VDC always have a big spread?
Barry Gold:
The differences are that we’re actually building product, which is something that VDC did not do. We’re building a digital audience co-op, where companies who have found it difficult or expensive to get into the digital marketplace can use our co-op to do. So that’s one of the key differences versus the model that we’re in previously.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
You used an or when you said expensive or difficult, isn’t it both? That’s an and isn’t it expensive and difficult?
Barry Gold:
Expensive and or difficult. Yeah, you’re right.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s sometimes… I mean, I’ve tried for EMM and I’m like, I’m not sure how this makes sense in any number of years, I’ll just keep selling it to channel partners. It’s too much work. You basically got a marketing team. Every one of those things. It’s tricky, man.
Barry Gold:
Yeah. It’s a lot of work.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
And so Mike, what, what do you do over at Think?
Mike Valant:
A lot of thought leadership work that supports Barry in the launch of the Think Data Group, as well as prospecting for new opportunities and also onboarding data sources from all the relationships we have bringing them into our portfolio.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Cool. That’s great. So I think I’ve got officially, if anybody wants to look up either Barry or Mike on LinkedIn, Mike’s Operations Lead and Barry’s the CEO and Founder. So we’ve got a couple other cool consultants on board too. We won’t dilly dally a bunch of time there, but everybody check out Think Data Group. They’ve got a lot of sources, which I think brings us into our topic, not just sources really, but… People say big data. And when I took my first class about big data, big data was defined as anything that couldn’t be processed quickly or there was so much of it that a traditional thing, like a spreadsheet or a power… Not a PowerPoint, whatever the access… Some of these traditional data systems couldn’t do it or couldn’t do it quickly. And I used to think marketing data didn’t really hit that qualification, but it totally does now. And that’s just marketing data. I know you guys work with a lot more than just marketing data, both Mike and Barry, what besides marketing data would you say has achieved big data status?
Barry Gold:
There are so many different types of data. When I think back to just as recently as 10 years ago, we used to talk about eight broad categories of data. Things like geolocation data, eCommerce data, social media data, exhaust data coming out of a key organizational process.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Yeah. Little specialty somethings.
Barry Gold:
Sure. Right. But you fast forward to today and we talk about over 40 different types of data. Things like internet of things, global data and certainly all the unstructured data that’s available today in the online and offline.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
What about life events? I see that’s here in a document we’ve shared and we’ll share later, but even that stuff, life events has become big data.
Barry Gold:
Very critical. So I would say, I don’t think there’s a category that couldn’t be considered part of the big data marketplace.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Especially at a high level.
Barry Gold:
Well, there’s just so much data. There are 25 billion gigabytes of data being created every single day.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Wow. No kidding.
Barry Gold:
Yeah. Across all these different [inaudible 00:05:13].
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Cool. Yeah. I’m looking at this thing guys, just as Barry’s lead in and I’m looking at a thing that Mike’s made, I believe the periodic table of data elements, which will show up in our blog a week after this podcast comes out dear listeners, but it’s pretty neat. It’s clear they put a bunch of time and thoughts into it and I’m excited to help promote it for them. So we talked about some of these megatrends, mega sources; regardless of the data set you’re picking, you need a strategy.
Barry Gold:
Right.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
And how do you set a strategy? I’ll give you an example. Let me pick one of these random ones. How do we get a customer setting a strategy for… In my world, it’s a lot of business firmographics, technical graphics, contacts, but let me pick something weird. Or, you know what? You pick something, you pick something.
Barry Gold:
Yeah. We’ve got a case study that Mike has developed for a client in the supply chain area. And so we’d like to have, I’d like to have Mike walk through that, because I think it’s really interesting and really demonstrates the power of the periodic table of data elements as a tool, whether you’re on the buy side or the sell side, it allows you to really have a perspective of the very broad marketplace. And this client specific use case I think is really illustrated with that.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Cool. Yeah. Mike, we’ll absolutely give the floor to you on that. Will this table also be available on your website for listeners? Currently available case study, et cetera. So you’re going to get the… Yeah? You’re going to get the brief version from Mike now guys, but if you want to get copies, either hit up Barry or Mike and they’ll give you a look at this thing. I mean, I’d really compare it to the fella Scott Brinker. He’s got that MarTech 5,000 graphic. This is at that level for sure, man. I think you guys tune it up a little more and make it in a couple of… You need a scientist marketer to look at this and really scientist it up some more, but it looks sweet. Mike hit us. What’s a good use case that you’ve found in strategizing for folks.
Mike Valant:
Sure. So this actually came out of an engagement that we’ve had. And as you think about the periodic table, think about it in terms of data elements and data categories that can be used to solve use cases across vertical markets. And that’s the way we think about it. So here’s an example. Imagine you’re an executive in the quick serve restaurant business and you’re responsible for maintaining a healthy supply chain. And what it means, not only the health of that supply chain assessing risk there as well as bring competitive intelligence, so you know what your competitors are doing as well. So think about supply chain from the production of commodities of food and materials all the way through the consumption on the other end. And let’s start with something simple like potatoes. Because if you’re selling burgers, you need potatoes, right? So you start by looking at it and saying, okay, is there any risk to the supply of potatoes?
Mike Valant:
So you start with weather and you look at forecast weather. You can look at actual weather and you can tell over historic times when you’ve had bumper crops and when you’ve got risk. And today, if you think about what’s happening in the west, droughts and wildfires, you may need to find sources in other parts of the world. And so you can use satellite imagery to look at potato crops anywhere in the world. And you can look at global trade data to see where companies are sourcing and providing potatoes. Is it Latin America, Southeast Asia, Europe? And where are the most productive areas where you can find new sources of materials.
Mike Valant:
And with that global trade data, you can also see who the shippers and the receivers are. And once you know who they are and who your own people are, you can apply business firmographics, which you mentioned earlier to Rick, to know who they are, how many locations they have, what countries they’re operating in. You can apply credit scores to those companies, [inaudible 00:09:06] to the risk of being bankrupt. And then you can also put property risk scores around them, where are the facilities, even your own stores, your own suppliers or your competitor’s suppliers.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Right. In a flood plane, from insurance or a wildfire area.
Mike Valant:
Exactly. Or crime, the threat of terrorism and even the transportation routes that you’re moving your materials around. So apply all of that, and then there’s also the ability to look at the eCommerce relationships for the companies doing business in your supply chain, as well as your competitors’ supply chain.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Awesome example. I think I’m allowed to mention this because it’s old enough now, but actually, I’ll just leave it nameless, but it’s one of the big box construction stores that you can go as a contractor or go as a consumer, one of those guys, and they were using through a partner of mine who had… It was more of a data tool. He helps them with this data tool, take the customer’s data and get some decisions from it. So they had first party data in this case, right? One of the things they examined was over time, location on property and likelihood of an accident, of a lost time accident. And so what they found was people working more than 40 hours a week on parking lot duty, as an example, was the thing they were able to take away and prevent like a hundred something injuries a year with this, which is… It’s really interesting to have a place to go.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
And I think it does… You have to have some kind of critical mass data to be able to do this. I’m sure not everybody’s a good fit for a great deal of intelligence, especially firms with not much to analyze, but this is awesome. The table’s awesome. And when you guys get to see it, you’ll understand how Mike is saying up top we have our core elements and then in the next periodic table, you’d have your… I don’t know, the rare earth or something. These guys have got it organized into use cases and vertical markets. And it’s pretty easy to put your puzzle pieces together. Very thoughtfully designed. Okay guys. Well with that in mind, Barry, you got anything to say on the way out. How can people get a hold of you if they want to?
Barry Gold:
They can go to our website, thinkdatagroup.com and just message us directly through there.
Rick Holmes – Show Host:
Cool. Use the contact us form folks. Great. Well, it’s been awesome having you guys on the show, thank you for bringing some content that I’ve never seen before. I’m usually quite grouchy about other people’s content because it’s never any good. But I’m glad I gave you guys a shot on that. Shameless plug for an Every Market Media thing at the end of the show. We are hiring very enthusiastically listeners. We have so many people that I need to put in place. I would really love it if you were in Chicago, but I won’t cry if you’re from somewhere else and extremely qualified. That’s every market media/career. Even if you’re not looking for an opportunity and you have a friend who is, send them to my careers page, that would be so good of you. We’ll catch you, I think, next week or maybe two weeks from now with another episode of the Corporate Data Show. Thanks for joining us. Think Data Group, Every Market Media, everybody has a nice day. Thank you.