The explosion of interest in predictive analytics among Australian marketers has been met by similarly-explosive growth in the number of vendors and consultancies vying to meet their needs.With such rapid growth in demand, how can marketers be assured they are getting the best result for their money?

Your customers are usually more than willing to tell you what is wrong with your business – and occasionally even what is right. Unfortunately, however, many businesses just don’t have the capability to listen effectively to all of that volunteered information and act on what they hear.

In what SAP and City Football Group (CFG) call a "groundbreaking event" for the sport of soccer, the two companies today announced a global, multi-year marketing and technology partnership that will provide CFG and its four international football clubs with analytics for business operations, fan engagement and player and team performance.

Virgin Australia has confirmed the acquisition of Australian data analytics consultancy, Torque Data, for an undisclosed sum.

Magazine distributor, Gordon and Gotch Australia, has tapped into IBM’s Predictive Analytics technology to provide more accurate print allocations and recommendations and improve sales for its customers.

Successful data-driven marketers are increasingly turning to first-party data to improve customer intelligence and lessening their reliance on third-party data sources, a new report claims.

"We at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security," said Apple CEO Tim Cook earlier this month during an Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) event where he was honored for corporate leadership. "We can and we must provide both in equal measure."

A social media analytics platform aimed at helping marketers better understand ROI from social programs and optimise activities has won this year’s The Big Pitch startup competition.

Twitter has capped off a busy week of proposed enhancements, a machine learning acquisition, and executive announcements with big changes to the way people follow events using its service.

There’s a lot of hype and buzz around retailers adopting new technologies, but many lack the marketing direction to employ these in a way that’s relevant to customers.

Banks have worked hard to accumulate their vast customer data repositories, and guard them jealously. But Spanish bank, BBVA, has determined the best way to profit from its data is to give it away for free.

Everyone talks about the importance of big data. But many organizations, although they collect and store customer data, do not put that data to good use -- or they don't know how to.

Australian marketers are behind their North American and UK counterparts when it comes to utilising technology and data in marketing activities, a new report indicates.

Drawing on a history of more than 50,000 analytics-focused client engagements, IBM today debuted 20 new behaviour-based predictive analytics solutions tailored to address 12 industries and use cases within those industries. The news came as Salesforce also revealed Salesforce Wave for Big Data, a new tool designed to help business users make sense of their information stores using the vendor’s Analytics Cloud.

Qantas’ customer and marketing analytics business announced it will begin a 100,000 strong panel to enable clients to engage Red Planet to conduct market research on their behalf.

Qantas’ Red Planet customer and marketing analytics business is expected to turn a profit in its first year and has already helped Australian book retailer, Dymocks, improve its marketing campaign efforts, the airline has revealed.

The appetite for big data projects within marketing functions has been revealed through internal customer polling at the Hadoop specialist technology developer, MapR.

Optus is increasingly combining data on customer behaviour, location, usage and interactions with traditional and digital information to give its product roadmap and marketing programs a shake-up, according to its insights chief.

Customers are less interested in hearing you talk, than in you talking to them, according to Vodafone marketing and communications general manager, Nilanjan Sarkar.

Building a clear action plan around customer analytics, along with cross-function collaboration, have been vital in making Telstra’s customer engagement efforts a success, according to its director of research, insights and analytics, Liz Moore.

Data-driven attribution has not only helped TransUnion better target customers across channels, it’s also given the US-based credit reporting firm’s CMO a new-found respect for display ads.