We were at a sunny Earls Court London today for Internet World and the Big Data show.


Lots of talk of personalisation using Big Data. The talk from ‘my things’ on how they use big data to personalise display advertising was interesting.

They can personalise based on all kinds of inferred data. Social, mobile, 3rd party, context, what point on the sales funnel you are etc. etc. and then predict exactly what display ad and product to show you before you even knew you wanted it - all within 120 milliseconds! Clever stuff, but the keywords here are ‘predict’ and ‘inferred’. I prefer the word ‘guessing’ and these guesses provide only a marginally increased

response rate.

While we agree in principle in personalising advertising to the user, it’s seem crazy we are still are not giving users the ability to control what is served and then see the data that is held on them.

Giving consumers control and transparency of their data, not only is good for business but its prevents consumers feeling spied open as they navigate the Internet, and actually means they might get served content that interests them.

We left Internet World 2013 and the Big data show, with a feeling that the fight for consumer control continues!