As promised this morning, please find the slides from today's AIMIA event on Big Data below. For all of you who couldn't make it, the presentation gives a quick overview of what big data means and what the challenges are but also highlights some of the simple best practices that should be implemented before we even start worrying about big data.

In fact, most marketers won't ever have enough data to have to worry about big data problems, but all of us would get a great deal of value from just aggregating all our different customer data sets into a single customer view - which doesn't have to be expensive either! Check out the slides for a few simple examples of how to use Splunk to start building a single customer view across channels such as your website, call center and CRM. 

Have you ever been involved in a single customer view project? Then you probably remember it as a seemingly never ending process with endless data challenges, some related to data quality but most to technology. 

Check out the below slides from our recent presentation at the Splunk Live event in Brisbane if you want to learn how to build a single customer view in Splunk across all your data sources with only a fraction of the resources (and cost) required up until now. No more data warehouse development and maintenance required, throw any data - structured (i.e. website behaviour, call center, CRM, etc) and unstructured (i.e. social) - at your Splunk platform, then analyse and report on it via dashboards or generate lists for new highly targeted cross-channel campaigns.

There seems to be an increased buzz around cross-channel media attribution from many vendors lately and although we posted on the subject of attribution before we never really got into the nuts and bolts of the different platform options so here you go.

Check out the below slides we recently pulled together for one of our clients - the 1st part is a recap on cross-channel media attribution best practice in case you're new to the topic but the 2nd part goes into the detailed pros and cons of the various different technology platforms we've had experience with.

• Google Analytics multi-channel funnels
• Adobe SiteCatalyst Cross-Visit Participation JavaScript plugin, Light Server Calls and DoubleClick/Mediamind Genesis integration
• Atlas, Mediamind and DoubleClick ad server based purchase path tracking plus custom media attribution modelling
• Specialised ClearSaleing media attribution platform and out-of-the-box reports

Finally, it's important to make a distinction between media attribution and purchase path tracking, one is necessary to enable the other but they are not the same. Tracking the complete purchase path, i.e. every paid and organic campaign touch point leading up to a conversion is a necessary requirement to be able to actually do media attribution or the allocation or conversion credits back to those touch points. The purchase path tracking is the data collection if you so want and the media attribution the actual analysis or modelling part - given attribution modeling is only as good as the underlying data the below slides are focusing manly on the data collection aspects of the different options.

Below are yesterday's slides from the Competitive Intelligence presentation at the Online Marketer conference in Melbourne.

We used the recent grounding of the Qantas fleet as an example to showcase some of the free (and paid) online tools that can be used to collect competitive intelligence - in our example, insights informing a Virgin campaign designed to poach Qantas customers.

Check out the tools we used and please leave a comment on this post if you know of any other great competitive intelligence tools!

Google just uploaded the videos from last year's Think Auto events in Sydney and Melbourne so I thought I'd share that with you. Check out the below recording including slides on how we think the automotive industry could crack cross-channel media attribution and finally give digital the credit (and budgets) it deserves.

The presentation covers basic media attribution best practice as well as some suggestions on how to track offline media responses online and link offline car sales back to online campaigns and website behaviour. Have a look, especially if you work in marketing in the automotive industry, as everyone seems to know how important digital is in the research process but no-one seems to be able to quantify exactly how much - here's a few ideas.