Rand Discusses Big Data Related to Marketing at 2015 NASSCOM Summit

In order for companies and organizations to effectively spend their marketing budgets, it’s important to know which tools at their disposal can best reach their customers.

William Rand, an assistant professor of marketing with an appointment in UMIACS, will discuss how companies can leverage big data to reach their target audiences in a presentation this week at the NASSCOM Big Data & Analytics Summit in Hyderabad, India.

“Data always has been at the core of analytics,” Rand says. “But data today comes in many forms, including video, images, symbols and natural language algorithms.”

To process this new world of data, Rand says, and make sense of it for human consumption, companies need a new computing model. “It should be one that is not limited by its programming, but able to train itself using tools and techniques from artificial intelligence, machine learning, and intense visualization and communication methods,” he says.

Joining Rand for the presentation is P.K. Kannan, chair of marketing in the Robert H. Smith School of Business.

The two Maryland faculty plan to use case studies to reveal how big data improves both accuracy and effectiveness in reaching an intended audience, as well as its role in marketing “spend”—the amount of money a marketing department allocates for different initiatives.

Rand and Kannan will also examine how universal the model of attribution is, which quantifies the influence each advertising impression has on a consumer’s decision to make a purchase.

Rand says their talk will go beyond traditional consumer-behavior oriented models of attribution, and will instead explore models powered by statistical machine learning that can scale to very large customer sets quickly.