The first invited speaker: Mr. Steven Spittaels (partner at McKinsey and responsible for the department of “Advanced Analytics/Big Data” at the EMEA level, see picture on top of this page) emphasized the fact that only leaders/pioneers bear the real fruit (e.g., Tesco, Amazon, Walmart). He gave some nice examples of analyses, such as traversal analysis: what are key touchpoints and service levels (see picture below).


Next, Mr. Steven Spittaels talked about Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM). The chart below shows the beneficial effect (i.e. incremental margin) thanks to additional spend (in different media) based on econometric models developed at McKinsey.


He also provided some nice examples of data as a by-product. E.g. based on location data from cell phones, Telefonica is able to estimate market shares of local barbers. New services such as snips: Predicting in which streets you have the highest probability of finding a parking spot.

He finished his very interesting talk by giving some advice: Do your buildup gradually (start with a limited-scale project, and gradually scale up). Create some scarcity (bonuses of those managers go up) so you create traction.

Then, Mr. Hugues Rey (@huguesrey, CEO of Havas Media Belgium, see picture below) took the stage. He talked about their services to measure meaningful connections to brands. More advanced studies include monitoring social media while broadcasting TV Ads (cross-media). The slide below shows their real-time buying system.




Emphasis on real time applications


Zalando is doing it very intrusively


Live auctions at Havas

Stefan Hendrickx (@_stef_hendrickx, CEO of HL Steam Ltd, a software company in finance located in Londen, see picture below) talked about the impact of social media on stock prices. Below, you see the graph of stock prices (including bid and ask prices) around August 13, 2013. On this date, Carl Icahn tweeted about Apple. Volume (as well as price) in the stock spiked after that. Click here to read more about that particular story. He also mentioned the hacking of the AP (Associated Press) Twitter account, which mentioned an attack, which caused market volatility to spike as well.


Mr. Luc Verbist (@Luc_Verbist, CIO at De Persgroep, a leading publisher in Belgium and The Netherlands, award winner of the "European CIO of the Year 2013", see picture below).

Mr. Luc Verbist discussed how they strategically use (big) data in their CRM systems (see picture below).

Next, Mr. Luc Verbist showed a graph (based on market research) showing which (news) channels are being used at which time of the day. Whereas the newspaper consumption period spikes during the morning, other media are “consumed” throughout the day. Tablets are shown in red. We observe several periods of usage.

Then, Mr. Luc Verbist talked about their infrastructure (see picture below). Apart from the traditional databases, he also ventured into the Cloudera Hadoop ecosystem with NGData.

Finally, a panel session was held with all four speakers moderated by Mr. Ferdinand Casier (@FerdiCasier) and yours truly (@dirkvandenpoel).

Based on a question from the audience, the great potential for Big Data in healthcare was discussed. Moreover, it was clear from the discussion that there is a need for well-trained analysts. We at Ghent University try to help by offering Master of Science in Business Engineering as well as the Master of Science in Marketing Analysis both with a specific focus on descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics. Ghent University also offers the Master of Science in Statistical Data Analysis. Afterwards, a nice cocktail party was held with superb networking opportunities. Congratulations to Agoria (@Agorianl, @Agoriafr) for organizing such a great event. They are planning several followup event for different industries... see you at those events.