Is Business In Its Entirety Moving Towards Data Nowadays?

Posted by Zack H Halliwell on September 26th, 2019

Technology in the past couple of years has been contaminating sectors which aren't explicitly "tech-friendly". The usage of automation-related pieces of technologies has been the trigger in connecting the front side of the business with technology as a whole. Let's analyse why data is so important nowadays, what are its biggest applications in business and why it's still relatively unregulated. 

It All Developed After The Cambridge Analytica Scandal 

Big data and its application towards business in general (in particular, marketing applications when associated with paid social ads and complex forms of retargeting) have been extremely impactful from a business perspective, leading towards the creation of dedicated libraries for the programming languages which are normally associated to data science for marketing purposes. Even if data has been used for business purposes since 2010, the usage of data points and big data has definitely become "mainstream" after the Cambridge Analytica scandal a year ago. 

How Does This Operate? 

Big data is the association of numerical values to users, which is then processed by Python tools that are indeed associating each individual variable/keyword to the person who specifically typed it into the site's search box or in the email which was asking for feedback. Data acquisition was the triggering point in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, given the fact that the company was illegally buying passively acquired data points from Facebook.  Once data is acquired and stored, it can be used to target precise demographics, users, or groups of audiences, without relying on the social channel of choice's (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) algorithm. 

Is This Legal? 

Not anymore. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in fact, GDPR hit the world of data massively, with big regulations on its acquisition process (it is, in fact, mandatory nowadays to reference and tell the user who lands on a page/uses a particular software whether or not that specific application is gathering data or not). The UK has been the centre of this particular matter, and the biggest corporate solicitors in Manchester have recently stated how this is becoming something they have to deal with on a more frequent basis. 

To Conclude 

The world of data is definitely impacting business as we currently know it. Given its importance and power in today's industry, we can safely say that the matter will definitely grow visibly in the next couple of years, potential conquering other forms of marketing which are still relying (especially when digital) on older forms of audiences targeting.