#1

November 19, 2015

I don’t know about you, but the name Big Data scares me. 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years, but the real scary part is how fast it's still growing at the present time.  Faceboook now has 1.5 billion monthly active users, most of them are on mobile. Google generates billions of searches each day. It took Uber 4 years to become a $50 Billion valuation company.

How can we understand something that outpaces our ability to comprehend it? Just take a look at the name Big Data, the helpless sense of how we are trying to define and conceptualize this tells me how much we understand it. We go from descriptive and imaginative technology names  like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, to bluntly Big Data.

What does Zen have to do with the art of Digital Marketing? In the best selling book “Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance”, author Robert Pirsig tries to define the abstract concepts of quality and value, while traveling across the country on a motorcycle with his 11-year-old son. Throughout the journey, they weathered storms, got into fight with each other, enjoyed beauty of the country, and strengthened their relationship. In the mix of all of the things they experienced during the journey, Robert was able to find a zen like feeling that tells him, that somehow, this is what's meant to be, and things will work out. The journey was as much of an external one as an internal one. 

If our job as a digital marketer is to deliver values to our clients by optimizing their campaigns, and gaining insights into vast volume of consumer data that’s still growing at an exponential speed, then a zen like mind set would perhaps help us focus on what's really important, and not get lost in the mix of things.