Never underestimate the power of Big Data. Its might can be witnessed in nearly every industry and professional endeavor on the planet.

Just this April, academics unleased the power of analytics to identify William Shakespeare as the author of a 400-year-old play long attributed to another writer. It took a couple of scholars, armed with pattern-detection software, only a few months to solve this centuries-old mystery, sending shockwaves throughout the worldwide academic community.

Big data has been particularly influential in transforming the sporting world. Every move a cricket bowler makes is now dictated by an avalanche of data intelligence, painstakingly sifted and searched to predetermine where and how hard the batsman might strike a ball – depending on where and how hard it’s bowled.

Big Data & Ad Management

Though yet to be fully exploited, the opportunities for big data to revolutionize the advertising world are also immense. For starters, consider the following four ways that the application of data analytics can help you maximize the value of your inventory and improve the efficiency and responsiveness of your business, all while minimizing costs.

• Integrates data from disparate systems
• Brings attention to impending issues before they happen
• Pinpoints emerging opportunities
• Enables better data-driven decisions

This is conceptually helpful — but still a bit vague. The best way to understand the power of data analytics and how it can transform the day-to-day productivity and accuracy of account managers and sales executives is through a real world example.

Faulty Pipeline

According to the latest update from your account manager, all signs point to him meeting his numbers for the quarter. What’s in his pipeline is more than enough to cover his quota. But wait a minute. A quick glimpse at your analytics-driven sales performance dashboard warns you that something is amiss. Based on predictive analytics driven off of your historical pacing and current inventory data, the account executive is going to fall significantly short of his estimate.

You dig a little deeper into year-over-year trends and discover a mismatch with the pipeline and the budget for the current year. Turns out there’s a fundamental problem with cutbacks at a major automobile manufacturer. You alert the account executive and in 10 minutes you’ve identified a major financial problem. Now, you’re clear to focus on an action plan to recover the budget.

Imagine delivering an up-to-date inventory rate card to account executives every day at 9 AM.

Much of the beauty of data analytics lies in its profound efficiency, its ability to cull through and consolidate tens of thousands of records across all of your different systems – CRM, traffic, accounting, ratings, social, etc. – to uncover in seconds information that it would take your staff days or weeks to assemble – if at all. And since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, analytics lets you define your interests as they change – because they change all the time. Today a channel might care about midday or prime or evening drive but tomorrow the focus could be on a specific hour or sponsorships or new business, Analytics lets you keep tabs on all of them — or none of them — however you need to pivot. In short, it’s a productivity multiplier – that gets smarter as it accumulates more information.

Effective data analytics allow you to automate your business processes. Set up a system once and you can repeat the results anytime you like. Imagine delivering an up-to-date inventory rate card to account executives every day at 9 AM. Instead of running reports on an ad hoc, as-needed basis, forcing your managers to wait for this information to become available, data analytics delivers relevant information perpetually.

There’s just no better way to make your ad business better.

Landmark Analytics

Our Landmark™ Analytics business intelligence product provides you with powerful, big data intelligence with media expertise. Offering a suite of robust tools, Landmark Analytics empowers your sales, traffic, programming and finance groups to make better data-driven decisions based on information compiled from all of your operational systems, and presented through intuitive, media-centric dashboards and reports delivered via mobile, web, portals or e-mail. Role-based reporting automatically delivers your chief stakeholders dashboards and reports focused on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in your business.

Using Landmark Analytics, organizations gain access to powerful data visualization, data mining and predictive analytics tools that enable your business to maximize revenue, optimize workflows and minimize costs.