Save 50% on a 3-month Digiday+ membership. Ends Dec 5.
No doubt the digital age is ruled by data. We give off bits of data with every act in digital media, from paying for things with a credit card to using a mobile phone to doing an Internet search. That’s led to the buzzword du jour: Big Data. Yet not everyone is buying into Big Data. Alan Mitchell, strategy director at consultancy Ctrl-Shift, thinks the term is misplaced because there’s not all that new in how we’re gleaning insights from data — and the real challenges of information flows aren’t being addressed.
Even with the vast amounts of data it deals in, it’s actually only skimming the surface of a deep sea of computation. There are more connections between the neurons in the brain of the average Joe than there are atoms in the universe (or so I am told). Big Data doesn’t touch what’s going on in peoples’ heads – their motivations, their intentions, their goals, priorities and so on. All it does is collect after-the-event data about what they do once they turn these thoughts and feelings into actions – and then it’s only those actions which register on some particular data gathering system. So Big Data never goes to the source – the fountainhead of Really Big and Important Data: human beings and what they want to do right now, or plan to do in the future.
Read Michell’s full post on the Ctrl-Shift blog.
More in Media
What publishers are wishing for this holiday season: End AI scraping and determine AI-powered audience value
Publishers want a fair, structured, regulated AI environment and they also want to define what the next decade of audience metrics looks like.
Digiday+ Research Subscription Index 2025: Subscription strategies from Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others
Digiday’s third annual Subscription Index examines and measures publishers’ subscription strategies to identify common approaches and key tactics among Bloomberg, The New York Times, Vox and others.
From lawsuits to lobbying: How publishers are fighting AI
We may be closing out 2025, but publishers aren’t retreating from the battle of AI search — some are escalating it, and they expect the fight to stretch deep into 2026.
Ad position: web_bfu