Big data can help you get more creative, too

SAN FRANCISCO — More and more companies are finding themselves boosting their revenues or cutting costs by analyzing data. But that’s not all, folks. Big data tools can also help you think more creatively and spot genuine innovation.

At least that can be true in the advertising business. The idea is to weed out the cliches and present people with genuinely interesting stuff.

“We often had to kind of extrapolate or take the best guess” based on truisms like the importance of family dinners,” said Dan Buczaczer, executive vice president of creative partnerships at digital-advertising outfit Vivaki, at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference today. “Now we can kind of accumulate the data around anything as we sort of collaborate together.”

Lately startups like DataPad and DataHero have been pushing new tools for data visualization lately, and the idea of letting many employees at a company easily understand trends in data is taking off. Hence the recent progress from startups like Quid.

Vivaki, which supports all the advertising agencies inside Publicis Groupe, uses Quid’s “augmented intelligence” software, which displays patterns based on textual information from lots of sources, in visually compelling ways.

Now Vivaki has collaborated with Quid to devise software called Zodiac, which “adds strategic expertise” and could help the company “answer larger cultural questions,” Buczaczer said.

Both Quid and Vivaki have sought to map the cultural universe, he said, which is why it made sense to join forces.

The results could help the Publicis agencies do a better job of reaching consumers through novel messaging, based on the freshest news articles, corporate documents, and unstructured data sources.

That way, ad agencies can get new batches of words to use in ads all the time. And if things work out, those ads can translate into revenue.

Then again, tools like Quid could let ad designers test out their messaging and find out if it all sounds a little boring. If so, they can make changes, said Sean Gourley, Quid’s co-founder and its chief technology officer.

The interface could be a few steps ahead of just doing lots of searching and reading online.

“You don’t want to go and click through and read everything,” Gourley said. “But you want that level of exploration [and] shift from data will give you answers to data will give you a space to explore better and deeper.”

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