By many accounts, however, modern day blunders are less drastic than past mistakes, while positive results are leaps and bounds beyond what big data could produce in the past.
According to Umbel, big data’s track record over the past few years includes numerous blunders. In one example, Target sent coupons for cribs and other baby accessories to a teenager who had yet to tell anyone that she was pregnant. The mailings tipped off an unsuspecting father.
In another blunder, Bank of America sent a credit card offer to California journalist Lisa McIntire, but the correspondence referred to her as “Lisa is a slut machine McIntire.” In another example, OfficeMax sent a letter to a father, who it referred to as “daughter killed in a car crash.”
More recently, however, big data is generating attention not for big blunders but instead for helping enterprising firms disrupt industries in surprising ways. In Britain, for example, mobile network operator Telefonica SA has started offering automobile insurance, reports Information Management.
The company is hoping to get a competitive edge by tracking driving patterns and using the data to offer discounted premiums to low-risk drivers. In another example, Orbital Insight has developed neural networks and satellite technology that measures the shadows of oil tanks in China to estimate oil consumption patterns, according to the Financial Times.
Similar technology can analyze parking lots to estimate shopping mall foot traffic. Big data is also being used to analyze sentiment toward companies on social media websites. In the pharmaceutical industry, meanwhile, Bristol-Meyers Squibb claims to have reduced the time required to run clinical trial simulations by 98% by using big data and cloud services from Amazon.con Inc.’s AWS Cloud offering, according Information Week.
The article also cites Xerox, which claims to have reduced the employee attrition rate in its call centers by using big data to understand drivers of employee turnover and how to improve employee engagement.
However, Big Data critics like to cite the errors in polling that led to the inaccurate forecasts indicating Hillary Clinton would win the presidential election. Some retailers, furthermore, send coupons to customers for the very same products that the customers have purchased, writes Scott Anderson in an Investor’s Business Daily commentary.
He maintains that brands need to do a better job of finding data that is relevant, which will improve customers’ overall experiences. New York Life, for example, was able to use an analysis of big data to drive its clients in retirement plans to online financial planning tools.
The campaign helped reduce call center expenses by cutting the volume of telephone calls the company receives from clients. Malibu Rum also had success with big data by using location data from smartphones to push out advertisements. Its campaign resulted in the company’s advertisements being viewed 8 million times in just four months and a corresponding increase in customer engagement.
