By Jennifer Pelino, Media Center of Excellence, IRI

Big data just keeps getting bigger. In fact, more than 2,000,000,000,000,000,000 (or 2+ quintillions) bytes of data are being created each day (that number has 18 zeros, for those of us feeling tempted to go back and count!).

Given all the data that companies have to ingest, integrate into their systems and decipher, it's no wonder that companies still say they are having a hard time managing their data. The fact that almost everything now is digital – including what we say, do and buy online – means most businesses have had to rapidly accelerate their digitization efforts over the past few years. They have been chasing ways to build out their data sets further and buying and implementing technologies at a faster pace than ever, while also trying to connect everything to a broader data ecosystem. To make this work, the data has to sit in an environment that allows all of this to be done more easily.

As a result, the cloud services market has been seeing tremendous growth, and Gartner estimates that it will grow to $332 billion next year.

Unfortunately, there haven't been any providers in the market that can check all the boxes that CPGs and retailers need.

There are different data providers – but they don't have full built-out cloud capabilities.

There are existing cloud solutions – but they don't have CPG or retail data, data science, apps or relevant CPG/retail industry knowledge.

There are managed service providers – namely, the big consultancies – but they don't have out-of-the-box modular solutions available, and they often aren't CPG and retail data experts.

This leaves companies with the option of handling most of it in-house, the main benefit being that companies can have full control and select what they perceive as the best solutions.

But this, too, has its limitations:

• Companies can only fully access their own data and their own data science.
• It's often challenging to try to bring together disparate data sets even within one's own company.
• Owned data is not always scalable and can be very fragmented.
• Trying to support platform investments already made while also trying to integrate new investments is often not an easy road.

Perhaps you've tried to get your data provider to give your data scientists access to build algorithms on the technology platform you access, to no avail. Or maybe you have lots of CRM data that you've carefully curated, but, due to privacy regulations, you can't share it – and you can't integrate it with other data sets that are also protected.

Wait a second, isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier?

At IRI, we have solved for this.

Our new Intelligence Suite™ allows you to bring your own data and data science and build your own applications to capture additional value for your business. It consolidates insights from previously disparate data sets and lets your data science teams develop custom algorithms, build proprietary applications and glean prescriptive insights so that you can get value from the data faster and easier. This cloud solution allows companies to use data in ways they haven't been able to before.

We know marketers face specific challenges, so we've created solutions that are specific to them. They can access the Marketing Studio on Intelligence Suite™, giving them exclusive access to household-level purchase data, allowing them to expand their first-party data sets, as well as customized and granular insights at the UPC and basket levels, all within the company's environment, to power specialized, high-impact consumer insights and audience activations. It allows you to connect household-level purchase data, your proprietary data, and other second-and third-party data for the most complete insights.

Let's face it: Data regulation is only going to get more intense, as cookies phase out and with the recent Apple iOS changes. Marketers have to be able to harness their first-party data much more effectively if they want to personalize marketing and optimize media. The Intelligence Suite Marketing Studio allows CPG marketers and data scientists to build proprietary applications and activate and measure campaign performance against highly customized audience segmentations – based on both purchase and brand engagement data – to meet your company's specific goals.

For effective media activation, you need a complete view of audience performance so in-house data scientists can make informed decisions on which audiences convert, create highly customized audience segmentations, and activate more optimized campaigns against them.

For better marketing measurement, it's important to have access to robust media exposure data, sales data and thousands of algorithms so that your in-house marketers can analyze marketing campaign effectiveness and develop proprietary, always-on attribution solutions.

With the Marketing Studio, you can improve both your media activation by getting to more prescriptive audiences and your marketing measurement by understanding your holistic performance and which strategies and content are reaching shoppers in the channels where they buy.

Household-level, transaction-level data is still the most valuable data asset in CPG – it helps you know what products and categories people are buying so that you don't waste your dollars targeting consumers who don't and won't buy. Accessing our pre-integrated third-party and partner data ecosystem gives you the most robust and ready-to-deploy offering for unmatched completeness and speed.

This is one way you can drive more impactful marketing campaigns in a continually noisy and cluttered ad environment.

I guess technology can make life a little easier, especially if you are a marketer or data scientist.

If you're intrigued, read our press release and reach out to your IRI representative or IRI@IRIworldwide.com for more info.