Remember when the customer service desk was just a euphemism for a complaint bureau? Back then, customers ranted on the phone or in person about returns, wrong sizes, and overcharges. The idea was a good one, but the end result was frustrated shoppers.

Fast-forward to today. Imagine you're out house-hunting, and using a mobile phone, you can find out immediately from the bank whether you can really afford that dream house. Or instantly find out specific flights that can be booked with your frequent flier miles.

The explosion of social media has changed the notion of customer service across all industries. A service once restricted to phones and then email has been opened through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

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Imagine for a second that you could interview a product. How often is it being used? For how long? And where in the house does it live?

Sounds crazy, but it's increasingly probable as marketers mine for data beyond the usual places -- web browsers, loyalty programs and smartphones -- and capture information from pill packages, soda fountains and the most mundane of consumer implements, the toothbrush.

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Corporate influence on education is a touchy subject, but when it comes to data-science education, corporations and academics are commingling more and more.

Companies including General Motors, GlaxoSmithKline, Hearst, Verizon, Yahoo, Independence Blue Cross and IBM are fostering symbiotic bonds with colleges and universities: Companies provide problems and the research data to potentially solve them, not to mention sponsorship dollars. The schools, in turn, create a well-trained data workforce with real-world business experience.

GM recently collaborated with IBM at Michigan State University, part of the school's MBA in analytics. The project brought together MSU students, IBM execs and Nathan Bruin-Slot, program manager for the GM Customer-Assistance and Relationship-Services initiative. Mr. Bruin-Slot worked on a weekly basis with students to produce analytics for improving the automaker's customer-ownership experience.

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Want 2,000 gross rating points worth of paper-towel-brand switchers? It just got a lot easier.

Buying based on consumers' purchases rather than their ages or genders will take a leap forward with this upfront season, as Nielsen Catalina Solutions rolls out a self-service system that lets buyers and sellers run instant analyses to understand how heavily the "Modern Family" audience is weighted with facial-tissue-brand switchers, or how reliably repeat airings of "Braveheart" deliver heavy buyers of Pop-Tarts.

Since 2010 NCS has done 1,400 such analyses with around 150 marketers, 50 agencies and 40 media companies. But the workload, expected to double this year, has outpaced what it can do on its own, said CEO Mike Nazzaro. So the joint venture of research firm Nielsen and supermarket-loyalty and data-analytics firm Catalina is launching a self-service version, AdVantics on Demand.

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Big Data has a TV show... or about as close to one as it's likely to get soon. National Geographic Channel's "The Numbers Game" is dissecting how people can user data to live healthier, happier and more successful lives.

National Geographic isn't quite getting into jargon like real-time modeling, Hadoop and predictive analysis. But it is making data accessible to basic cable audiences as "Numbers Game" host Jake Porway, a data scientist and self-proclaimed numbers nerd, provides insights like the number of times men should have sex every year in order to increase their chances of living by 50%.

The first two episodes of "The Numbers Game" averaged 800,000 total viewers and 423,000 viewers 25 to 54 years old, according to National Geographic, 47% more 25-to-54-year-olds than the network has recently averaged in prime-time. The series concludes its initial three-episode run on Monday but returns for a 12-episode second season early next year.

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Political campaigns determine who runs government, but can campaign experience help navigate policy for health care, education and other big issues affecting society? Rayid Ghani, chief scientist for the most sophisticated, data-driven presidential campaign thus far -- President Barack Obama's re-election bid -- hopes so.

His latest initiative is happening in the president's adopted hometown of Chicago. The University of Chicago's Computation Institute and Harris School of Public Policy is accepting applicants for a summer fellowship program that Mr. Ghani is spearheading. The "Data Science for Social Good" program will allow 35 to 45 students, most of them graduate-level, to apply their knowledge of statistics, data-mining, machine learning, computer science and other data-related skill sets to society's pressing issues.

"My goal is to figure out how you help a lot of people by working on big data and analytics directed toward large social problems," said Mr. Ghani, naming public safety, health care and education among them. Program fellows will pair with mentors starting June 1 to kick off what Mr. Ghani hopes to eventually become a larger, yearlong program.

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Credit-card firms are selling their credit-card transaction data for digital advertising and other marketing efforts, but they're not exactly broadcasting the fact for fear of consumer backlash.

Mastercard Advisors launched its Information Services division around two-and-a-half years ago and in recent months has been approaching media-agency trading desks with an enticing offer: data representing 80 billion consumer purchases.

American Express has also turned its transaction data into a revenue stream through its Business Insights consulting division which has aimed direct mail and online offers to card holders on behalf of advertisers for years, though on an aggregate level. More recently, AmEx has modeled audience segments for use in online ad targeting. The company declined to name any partners in the endeavor, but stressed the AmEx data models don't allow for direct targeting of its card holders.

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When IFC was seeking ideas for quirky comedic programming, the network knew where to look: iTunes data. Netflix and Amazon are using innovative data analysis to shape TV and video programming, too. Yet despite TV networks' experimentation with new data sets, algorithms aren't about to replace the human touch any time soon.

"WTF With Marc Maron" and Scott Aukerman's "Comedy Bang! Bang!" got their starts as podcasts that gained followings on Apple's iTunes. For IFC, that not only reflected a potential built-in audience for a TV show, but one that reflected the subcultural sensibilities the indie-film channel and purveyor of "slightly off" humor hoped to attract. So, the network transformed the podcasts into TV shows.

"There's a particular tastemaker who we serve ... and I credit them with much of the podcast trend," said Jen Caserta, president of IFC. "It's not as simple as it used to be, solely basing decisions on studies," she said. "You can collect data all around you now."

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Would you hire Sears to manage your data strategy?

The troubled retailer known for brands like Kenmore and Craftsman is promoting a business-to-business brand called MetaScale that does just that.

Around three years ago, Sears embarked on an internal initiative to make its legacy data systems faster and able to offer more cost-efficient analyses for things like pricing and targeted offers. At the heart of that project was Hadoop, the file system employed by just about every company looking to transform traditional data operations to enable speedier access and analysis.

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Even though it was many years ago, HTC Senior Director of Global Media Arlene Villanueva vividly remembers engaging in a data tug-of-war while working at a different company.

But agencies must ask themselves: Is wrangling over the rights to data generated on a client's dime worth angering the client, especially at a time when marketers can build their own trading and data-management tools?

"There's a bit of fear," said one marketer who wished to remain anonymous, noting that because data analytics now drive most strategies, every agency is attempting to be the keeper of it. The marketer said that when a team asked its media agency to share the data it generated through a third party management vendor with another firm the client worked with, the media agency said no. The shop argued that because the agency was the one on the contract with the data-management vendor, the client's data was sealed. It took the client a number of months to win back full access -- and that happened only after it threatened to end its relationship with the agency.

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Mobile ad startup Tapad announced on Thursday it closed a $6.5 million series B funding round led by venture capital fund Firsthand Technology. By analyzing hundreds of data points including device type, browser type and content source, Tapad says that it can target consumers across devices with 70% to 75% accuracy. In turn, the company has attracted high-profile investors and 75 customers in Fortune 500.

But Tapad is just one of numerous cross-device tracking companies to capture the attention of Madison Avenue and Silicon Alley with such claims. While mobile device adoption has been a boon to Apple and Samsung, it has threatened to make cookies--the lifeblood of digital advertising--less relevant. As the cookie slowly crumbles, advertisers have heralded new technologies that will one day replace them.

"I don't think cookies on the desktop are going away." Nihal Mehta, CEO and co-founder of social intent targeting startup LocalResponse, said. "They're always going to exist." That said, his company is among an emerging group focused on how to track people's media behavior across devices that goes beyond basic cookie tracking.

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Nielsen is going beyond trying to track everything you watch to tracking everything you buy -- adding data from what an executive said is "virtually all" credit and debit-card purchases plus bank statements, including online bill payments and paper checks, to what it already gets from food and drugstore purchases.

Nielsen is anonymously matching all that data through an undisclosed third party to members of its TV ratings panel, an executive of the company told Advertising Age, and plans to expand such matching to online and other measurement services. Linking TV audiences to their purchases has been available to packaged-goods marketers for a few years through Nielsen Catalina Solutions and elsewhere based on data from retailer loyalty programs. But Nielsen's broader data set opens the capability to telecom, restaurant, travel, entertainment, financial services and virtually all retail advertisers.

That represents 37 billion transactions, $4 trillion in sales and $10 billion in ad spending annually, said Nada Bradbury, senior VP-global product leader of Nielsen Buyer Insights, in a presentation Tuesday at the Advertising Research Foundation Re:think 2013 Conference in New York.

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In the last few years we've witnessed the advent of mobile commerce, multichannel commerce, social commerce and other variants that are casually lumped into the e-commerce bucket. Almost every industry has at least begun the transition from a totally brick-and-mortar approach to something at least a little more digital.

However, modern U.S. grocers, at least until very recently, stubbornly refused to embrace the internet. Most grocery-store websites have been reminiscent of the sites of many brick-and-mortar stores 10 years ago -- focused primarily on branding and general information. This is in sharp contrast to omnichannel grocers in France and the U.K., who view the internet as an extension of their store experience.

The second-largest grocer in the U.K., Tesco, launched a major initiative to digitize its product catalog for marketers and programmers in 2007. As a result, dozens of innovative shopping assistants and targeted marketing campaigns sprung up.

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London-based startup Spider.io, which helps publishers and advertisers identify legitimate web traffic, has discovered a ring of more than 120,000 hijacked computers that have been flooding websites with fake traffic and in turn costing advertisers more than $6 million per month, the company said in post on its blog. Called the Chameleon botnet, this cluster of computers typically generates more than nine billion illegitimate ad impressions across 202 websites monthly.

Spider.io, which said it has been tracking the Chameleon botnet since December 2012, found that 95% of the machines involved access the internet from residential IP addresses in the United States. Each bot within the network of computers resembles a group of web users concurrently visiting one the 202 implicated websites. In a typical month, the botnet accounts for at least seven million ad-exchange cookies.

The Chameleon botnet is "sophisticated" because its bots mimic human web activity, Spider.io said. Bots in Chameleon click on ads at an average rate of 0.02%, for example. The average click-through rate for humans is between 0.02% and 0.04%. The bots also generated mouse traces that mirrored how humans typically peruse the web.

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As digital-data tracking and availability has evolved, marketing-mix modeling techniques and depth of insights have also evolved, allowing marketers knowledge of consumers they only once dreamed of.

Pixel and cookie tracking by ad servers (such as DoubleClick or Atlas) reveal a vast amount of details about online consumers. Pixel tracking provides information such as IP address (which reveals geographic locations of users), as well as time and date stamps. Cookies tell us what consumers clicked on, how much time they spent

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Tracking tags are bits of code that enable ad serving, site analytics, audience-segmentation, and social sharing tools on websites. In other words, tags are what make the web tick. By the end of last year there were nearly 1,000 different tracking tags floating around the top 500 websites. That was over 50% more than the 645 unique trackers found in the first quarter of 2012, according to Evidon.

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Data scientists are often portrayed in the media as dull and uninspired. But in practice, creative ideas with data at their core prove that facts and figures can be the stuff of standout branding. Here, we look at four areas of data that marketers have tapped to showcase brand stories in novel ways without playing it needlessly "safe."

Behavior

Consumer-electronics giant Sharp teamed with U.K. agency Work Club to promote the brand's sponsorship of European soccer tournament the UEFA EURO 2012 last year with a data-driven campaign that aimed to fuel soccer fans' passion.

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Cleveland Indians fans can expect an injection of new blood this season from former New York Yankee Nick Swisher, speedy outfielder Michael Bourn, and ex-Red Sox skipper Terry Francona. One thing they can't expect: lots of bobblehead giveaways this season.

In fact, while the Tribe in the past has planned five to seven promotions featuring bobbleheads -- wobbly figurines of beloved team players -- the 2013 season will bring just two, according to Alex King, VP-marketing and brand management for the Cleveland Indians.

Marketing-mix modeling, a data-centric marketing approach that's still novel in the sports world, drove that decision, he said. "What we found is, it's most incremental for us to have more giveaway nights and fewer giveaways per night," said Mr. King, a former P&G exec who grew up a Cincinnati Reds Fan. So, rather than give a promo to every attendee, only the first 10,000 or 15,000 might get them.

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Many a news operation has fallen in love with Chartbeat, the web-analytics software that gives reporters and editors a real-time look into which parts of their websites readers are visiting. Now Chartbeat has begun mining that same publisher data to help digital-media salespeople sell ads on parts of their websites historically dismissed as advertising wastelands.

In December, Chartbeat began offering a handful of publisher sales teams a beta version of a new dashboard that displays the amount of engaged time website visitors are spending in front of certain ad-unit placements and certain sections of the site. By arming sales teams with this information, Chartbeat believes it can help them make a case to brand advertisers that certain parts of webpages are more valuable than originally assumed. (Direct-response advertisers already use audience buying to find the best impressions to buy, often no matter page placement.)

"The lesson is that the place where readers are spending their time is not where we traditionally assumed," said Alex Carusillo, a product manager at Chartbeat.

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When Maya buys a pair of running shoes at a sporting-goods retailer using her store loyalty credit card, that information is almost immediately diffused across a spectrum of consumer-data companies and databases, or as one data consultancy exec put it, "from your wallet to the world." Here's what Maya's data journey from purchase to targeted marketing message might look like.

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Some of the largest marketers in the world are fencing off their data. Unilever, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark and Kellogg are opting to keep their data and what they learn from using it to themselves rather than operate through their ad agencies.

Agency holding companies in recent years have opened central trading desks to buy digital media for multiple clients based on common pools of consumer and media data, but more clients are opting for private systems. One reason is expense -- data and insights cost considerably more on the open market than the actual media impressions -- and another is practicality. Tying up data and insights in a system owned by an agency, some people familiar with the private systems said, could essentially prevent marketers from ever changing shops because of the risk of losing access to the database and having to start from scratch.

Unilever and Kimberly-Clark Corp. in the past year have moved to create their own standalone data-management platforms and trading desks, working with WPP's Mindshare but staying separate from WPP's centralized Xaxis trading desk.

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One of the biggest big-data challenges for marketers is how to take the vast amounts of customer information accumulated in the offline world and translate it into bits and bytes for use in the world of online advertising. This process of CRM retargeting, as it's sometimes called, marries the age-old practice of customer-relationship management with the new and sometimes creepy technique of retargeting, best known as the process by which ads for things you thought about buying chase you around the web.

In the CRM version, instead of your browsing history shaping your online-ad experience, it's your purchase history and other business-critical information collected by a particular company that's doing the work. This is a powerful -- and touchy -- business.

Industry standards require marketers to be very diligent about scrubbing the data used in online ads free of personally identifiable information. But Google "data anonymity" and you'll find a vast landscape of skepticism about just how effective data-anonymization practices are. Much of the suspicion comes from an academic community that has long been pondering the feasibility of data anonymity. A 2010 paper called "Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization" concluded that the faith put in anonymization practices was overstated. Its author, Paul Ohm, now works for the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that late last year asked nine data brokers for more information on what data they're collecting and what they do with it. It could be the prelude to the sort of legal restrictions the online ad industry is trying to fend off through its own self-regulatory efforts, run by bodies like the Network Advertising Initiative and Digital Advertising Alliance.

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Sure, "big data" -- the catchphrase and the reality of it -- is everywhere, but do you always recognize a big-data moment when you see it? Or, for that matter, when it taps you on the shoulder, spins you around, slaps you in the face and punches you in the stomach?

Last month, Britain's Guardian newspaper published a leaked video on its website from defense contractor Raytheon. In it, a Raytheon staffer casually demonstrated its eerily named RIOT -- Rapid Information Overlay Technology -- system. As The Guardian put it, "Using RIOT, it is possible to gain an entire snapshot of a person's life -- their friends, the places they visit charted on a map -- in little more than a few clicks of a button." RIOT does so by mining public social-media posts and even information hidden in photographs (e.g., some smartphones automatically record the exact location a photo was taken -- latitude and longitude tucked in the "EXIF header data" -- and that embedded information can stay attached to an image indefinitely). Using a pattern-recognition algorithm, RIOT can even parse Foursquare check-ins to predict where an individual might be at any given time.

The RIOT revelation was, of course, a big-data moment -- a blatant and easily recognizable one, at that.

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Data is becoming a very expensive topic on Capitol Hill. If reports from the largest data brokers and digital-data collectors are any indication, more money is being spent to lobby lawmakers on issues pertaining to the consumer data industry than ever before.

It's not just the traditional data brokers and services firms lobbying Congress around data security and privacy issues, though. In fact, while Acxiom, Epsilon and Experian maintained their spending levels in 2011 and 2012, Facebook and Google -- two of the most pervasive digital-data collectors -- drastically increased their lobbying expenditures between 2011 and 2012.

According to Ad Age's analysis of U.S. lobbying disclosure reports, Facebook, whose efforts are heavily focused on data privacy and security, multiplied its spending 2.5 times in 2012 on outside lobbying firms and on in-house efforts. The company dropped nearly $4.6 million on lobbying last year -- $4 million of which went toward its in-house staff's lobbying -- up from $1.8 million in 2011, the reports show. In 2012, the company tacked on an additional three outside firms to its data-related lobbying roster, using a total of seven in 2012 that dealt with data issues.

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Real-time modeling is an approach to audience modeling that employs information that can be put to use immediately after being collected.

Keith Gooberman, VP-trading and platform operations, at Varick Media, on Real-Time Modeling:

Real-time modeling would be trying to identify an audience in real-time so you can quickly act upon it. For example, noticing a jump in activity driven to your website in the morning (due to some specific, searchable term) might influence you to contextually target the word using display advertising immediately.

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Basing all your marketing on data is not a creative solution

A few weeks ago, I overheard a principal from another agency proudly boast, "Data drives every piece of creative we put out today."

My immediate reaction was, "Boy, your creative must really suck."

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Sometimes data crunching is as much about knowing how to communicate it as it is the actual data work. For Keith Gooberman, VP of trading and platform operations at MDC Partners-owned Varick Media, the ability to translate his work to business execs was key to professional advancement.

"My career really exploded when I started to be able to talk to people about it," said Mr. Gooberman, who oversees the media-trading department and platform managment team for the agency trading desk.

A lifelong New Yorker who grew up on the upper East side of Manhattan, he studied mechanical engineering at Union College in Schenectady. Then, realizing he'd have to move away from the city to pursue a career in engines or rocketry, Mr. Gooberman ended up in the online-ad industry instead, getting his start as a temp at Conde Nast Digital working for the publishing giant's director of finance. His job was to determine how to sell and price digital ads, identify revenue streams and conduct rate card analysis and financial reporting.

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I met recently with the head of a large company's sales and service organization, and I could see the frustration on his face. His company has added new online capabilities, increased the smarts of its salespeople and revamped its call centers. It also analyzes more customer data than ever and is genuinely trying to improve the customer experience. "I get good reports from our sales and marketing teams," he said. "But I really thought our service-improvement efforts would do more to move the needle."

Why are companies like this one -- well intended and improvement-oriented -- falling short when it comes to creating relevant, engaging customer interactions that deliver results at scale? This is what the 2012 Accenture Global Consumer Pulse Research sought to find out.

We learned that customers are frustrated, sometimes in unlikely ways. Their expectations also vary from channel to channel, with companies' service improvements often going unnoticed. Customers are also more inclined than ever to switch providers. The problem affects most industries, but it's particularly acute in the wireless phone, internet and cable/satellite service sectors -- industries whose offerings are already rapidly commoditizing.

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