What’s the Role of Data Scientists With Online Advertising?

data-scientists-wantedThe common image of the advertising professional used to be chain-smoking, Martini-swilling folk we see in Mad Men, but not any longer! Today, the more common reality is the image of a data scientist as the driving force behind advertising. This change is in part due to the rise of Computational Marketing technology that I’ve been highlighting for a while now. Big data is the differentiator for success in many industries today including advertising. A very interesting article  appeared recently in The Guardian that discusses the competitive forces in the advertising industry that have fueled the interest in big data analytics. A key observation from the article:

The industry has been revolutionised. Besides an increase in whiteboards and shorter lunch breaks, almost everyone spends more time working with Excel spreadsheets and online data dashboards – and those at the data deep end have had to get to get to grips with new analytics software like Hadoop.