Sign In
Upcoming Event
Free Newsletter
Harrisburg ad agency opens big-data shop
Joel Berg//December 11, 2015//
Listen to this articleThe new company, called WildFig, aims to show businesses what they can do with the data they already collect and store, executives with Pavone said in a recent interview at the company’s headquarters.
“Some folks don’t really appreciate what can come out of that data,” said Kevin Purcell, WildFig’s chief data scientist and an adjunct instructor at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology.
BIG SUMMIT
Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is hosting a data analytics summit at its downtown campus Dec. 14-16.
The summit, called “2015 Data Analytics Summit II: Structuring the Unstructured,” will cover the process of examining large data sets to uncover hidden patterns, market trends, customer preferences and other information useful to businesses.
Keynote speakers will include James Pennebaker, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Bob Sutor, vice president for mobile, solutions and mathematical sciences at IBM Research.
The event is geared toward business and government leaders, data scientists, analysts, researchers, educators and students who are working on big-data analytics issues.
To register, visit the Harrisburg University website.
Purcell and his colleagues aim to show them.
“It’s not unlike the early days of the Web,” said Amy Murray, Pavone’s COO.
Companies have heard they need to do more with big data, just as they once heard they needed to launch a website, Murray said.
And as in the early days of the Internet, some companies are skeptical. That mindset is one of the challenges facing ad agencies as they try to interest clients in applying big data to marketing.
“They ask how will it improve their processes or save time with back-office work,” said Sean Iannuzzi, head of technology and development in the Philadelphia office of marketing services company Harte Hanks. “They want to see the return.”
Among the benefits, he said, is better, speedier targeting of ads to existing and potential customers as they shop on mobile devices.
Finding talent to staff big-data companies is another challenge.
“Big data experts are rare and costly, so there’s a price to trying to do this,” said Tim Clark, a partner in The FactPoint Group, a California-based market research and consulting firm.
