Want to reach someone who wants to buy a car, rather than just kick the tyres? Or pick up some home and garden equipment, rather than just seek inspiration? Maybe you should be looking up a tree.

While explosive growth in data volumes presents a challenge for many marketers, for US-based data storage technology company, NetApp, servicing that storage need has helped it grow to US$5.5 billion in annual revenue. But the company’s success has also come at a cost, serving to typecast and limit its visibility. Enter the CMO.

The data minefield facing organisations today means CMOs need to up their data management game or risk exposing a brand’s reputation and breaking down customer trust, Veritas Technologies CMO, Lynn Lucas, warned.

Global data and tag management company, Ensighten, has raised US$53 million in debt and equity financing to further its plans to expand its omni-channel customer management offering.

With cross-device marketing becoming a hotbed of activity, brands looking for innovative ways to be more visible to the right consumers at the right moment and right time. This week, a number of ad tech vendors announced plans promising to do just that, offering new tech features and partnerships aimed at helping improve ad visibility, data insights, and uniting desktop clicks and conversions with mobile activity.

Marketers increasingly adopting a data-driven approach should be wary of misleading or poor data, a leading analytics consultancy claims.

Oracle is moving into the market for big customer data by buying BlueKai, which aggregates data on consumers and offers it to marketers via a platform for running targeted marketing campaigns on the Web, offline and on mobile devices. Terms of the deal, which was announced Monday, were not disclosed.

In the realm of marketing, data is definitely the new black. But to hear it spoken of at conferences, you might also assume it is the new black magic, capable of doing everything from enabling accountability of every marketing dollar spent through to predicting customer behaviour. Either concept would be considered fantastical, were they also not increasingly becoming true.

Most analytics tools put data in an historical context. That's all well and good, but if what if you want to use past data to gauge future performance? That narrows your analytics options. These six tools will help you make practical use of your data in order to make business decisions.

Big data may seem to promise big insights to users, but more isn't always better, cautions statistician Nate Silver, who became one of America's most well-known faces of data analysis after his FiveThirtyEight blog accurately predicted 2012 presidential election results in all 50 states.