Imagine the worldwide production of digital information as a stream.

At first, those online interactions only constituted a few gigabytes globally, of which only a small stream of gatherable data was produced. This stream consisted of our internet searches, our communications, our uploads, and our downloads. In other words, this stream was our digital footprint.

As the internet spread, so did the quantity of information being produced, in fact the global production of data hit over 1 exabyte in 2008. For the first time the internet could be accessed via mobile, adding another way for customer data to be created and collecting, swelling the stream to a greater size. Yet more unstructured data was being produced as we emailed, messaged, texted, created documents, produced powerpoints, audio recordings, videos, illustrations, and even memes.

As the volume of data being produced increased, so did the depth of the information. No longer was the data mostly unorganized as unstructured data began being organized into the far more useful structured data. Structured data came in the forms of databases and excel spreadsheets, neatly ordering the information to be easily accessed and used. Structured data passed its Exabyte mark in 2016, 8 years after unstructured data.

Well where are we at today?

With many more data streams such as GPS location, Data usage, data cookies, purchase history, microphone recordings and many more the sources of data have exploded. And not just the sources, but also those active online have vastly increased dramatically over the last few years. In a sentence, our lovely stream has become more of a flood.

And as the amount of data has increased, we have, with greater speed, fallen behind in storing it.

And as time progresses we get further behind. But even if we don’t have enough room to store ALL data, we can at least store the important parts.

Structured data is the far more useful of the two. The easy access and standardized layout makes it perfect for the use of business, as it is very easy to analyze for trends. And as only 10% of all data is structured, we have plenty of room to store it too!

Although structured data’s less useful compatriot un-structured data often has to be thrown off a cliff should there be a lack of room.

Wasteful right? All that data just going off into the void, completely useless to everyone. But fear not! Due to our increasingly invasive forms of data collection (Alexa is always listening), we can divert these streams of data into our nifty ‘Marketing Dam’ which lets us make use of it.

Once collected the un-organized data is thrown through a series of autonomous computer generated algorithms (known as deep learning programs) whereby trends can be found with inhuman speed. The identification of these trends is where the money is made because it can be used to predict future behavior.

Altogether everything is humming along nicely, the world makes reams of data and marketers slam it through the autonomous trend spotting machine.

To give an overview, 90% of all data EVER made was produced in the last few years. And we can’t store it all, only what we believe to be most important.

But in the not too distant future, with smartwatches, fit-bits, electronic clothing, and blue-tooth enabled fridges will we be able to make use of all the new data that will be dumped into our already overflowing stream? Will the ‘Internet-of-things’ be a golden opportunity to learn more about customers or just add more wasteful information to be thrown off the cliff?

Let me know your thoughts below!