Why The Nielsen Company is an #mrx Big Data company avant la lettre
Recently there was an interesting discussion on the Next Gen Market Research (NGMR) Linkedin group. The original discussion was started by Emma Kingham, Marketing Manager at Warc. She asked to "Make a prediction about the future of market research that you believe is GUARANTEED to happen". Pretty soon there was a subthread on market research and Big Data. Most of us agreed that the analytical capabilities you will find in the market research world can be valuable for Big Data, especially given the strong IT-leaning it seems to have. What we didn't agree on was, suprise suprise, the definition of Big Data itself. Basically there were two schools of thought. One group saw Big Data as a relative concept: what is small for one community might be big for another. This school basically saw no difference between Big Data and Normal Data: It's just more of it. The other group, that included me, stressed the technical challenges (Hadoop, Mahout, and so on). In my view a lo