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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"Keep Calm and Continue Testing." The Harvard student's T-shirt tagline seemed to encapsulate the mood in the frigid room filled with data crunchers. It was just another drizzly Saturday in the MIT neighborhood of Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., where mostly young men gazed at their laptops, observing predictive models parsing data representing grocery-store purchases of things like DVDs and milk. It was just another hackathon.

But this time it was sponsored by a consumer-data firm hoping to foster innovations in data analysis, and perhaps get a jump on the competition when it comes to harvesting potential data-science employees. More and more companies with lots of data to play with are sponsoring hack events to tap into fresh analytical talent.

"It smells like math in here," quipped Malcolm Faulds, head of global marketing at Dunnhumby. The 24-year-old consumer-data company was sponsoring the hack, an 11-hour slog pitting small teams of coders against one another in a contest to come up with the most accurate model for predicting the sales success of several grocery items 26 weeks after launch.

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In 10 years, there will be 50 billion industrial machines connected to the internet, predicts Stephen Liguori, executive director-global innovation and new models at GE. The 123-year-old firm calls it the "industrial internet" and it's the next wave of the consumer-focused internet of things connecting everyday products to data-collecting platforms.

The phenomenon is a ways off but GE is working to generate technology that collects and parses data to create greater efficiencies for businesses such as aviation, health care and "for folks that work in the power grid," said Mr. Liguori, speaking yesterday afternoon at the Ad Age Marketing and Technology Summit at Internet Week in New York.

Mr. Liguori joined a host of other marketers to discuss the new tech- and data-driven CMO and the increasing need for CMOs to work in tandem with CIOs to manage the vast swaths of data generated int his new era.

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AT&T is the country's fifth largest ad spender -- and now its using data gleaned from its own digital advertising to to help other marketers buying inventory through AT&T's AdWorks business.

The company is unveiling a new platform, called Blueprint, for targeted online, mobile and TV ads. However, the platform falls short of achieving what largely remains elusive for advertisers: a way to target one person or group of the same people across digital, mobile and traditional platforms. At the outset, there will be three Blueprint platforms: one for online, one for mobile and one for TV. Most notably, it will be using the intelligence it gathers from its own corporate digital ad efforts to inform the online Blueprint platform.

"We're both an ad network and an advertiser ... our ads show up in thousands of websites that go beyond our network. The nice thing about that is we can leverage that learning," said Maria Mandel Dunsche, head of marketing and media for AT&T's AdWorks. The company's own ads create 4 billion signals per month that it uses to identify audience segments and interest categories, said Ms. Mandel Dunsche.

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The hype around data ain't all it's cracked up to be, and believe it or not, that's something that can be heard often from people who work in data-related fields.

Stewart Pratt, director of data and analytics at SapientNitro is one. Steeped in philosophy and economics, Mr. Pratt has unique theories on the world and data's role in it, combining a dedication to humility with a practical recognition of what data can -- and cannot -- do.

"When I speak about the humility of the modern data scientist, I'm referring to receptivity to the limits and role of big data," he said. "Big data can help us identify correlations we may have otherwise missed, but it isn't well-suited for helping us to understand causality or meaning."

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Time Warner Cable, Hearst, HBO and Verizon are helping to fund the fledgling NYC Media Lab as part of a media-industry effort to encourage and benefit from research in the same way that tech companies already do.

NYC Media Lab, which fosters alliances between corporations and data and media researchers at the city's universities, is a collaboration among the New York City Economic Development Corp., Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Columbia University, modeled on existing media labs at MIT and Stanford. It opened its doors in 2010 with the help of a $250,000 commitment from the EDC, but in the past year has secured the four media companies' promises to provide $50,000 a year each for three years.

As paying charter members, the companies are afforded access to the findings of research work conducted on the behalf of other participants. "We're connecting our charter corporate members with students and faculty," said Roger Neal, executive direct at NYC Media Lab.

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The Weather Company has been touting its data-driven targeting capabilities to the ad world for some time now, but the emphasis was on its programming during its presentation to digital ad buyers on Monday.

Starting in July, the company plans to introduce short-form shows available for viewing on The Weather Channel, on its website and on mobile devices, including "Virus Hunters," a dramatic look at super viruses that could affect large groups of people, and "Alive," which will chronicle the harrowing tales of people who survive treacherous weather events.

It also plans web series "Brink," which focuses on crusaders who have helped save endangered species, and "Grid Breakers," which tracks intrepid explorers in extreme weather conditions.

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Venture capital dollars are pouring into a new class of startups that provide data services to small and mid-sized companies. Their goal, in a nutshell, is to automate tasks once assigned to a data scientist or teams of technologists, making big-data capabilities possible for smaller companies.

The space is nascent, but one analyst pegs investor funding in data-related companies in the hundreds of millions.

Israel-based SiSense set up shop in Redwood City, CA about a year ago and raised a $10 million Series B funding round earlier this month led by Battery Ventures, along with Opus Capital and Genesis Partners. "You don't need a PhD," the company says on its website, which touts its tools for "non-technical users to perform tasks that once required support from a team of database admins, engineers, and data scientists."

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The typical ad-industry data-science professional holds a masters or doctoral degree in computer engineering, statistics, and similar fields. But Andy Kahl is anything but typical. The director of data analysis at ad-privacy-services firm Evidon studied anthropology and religion, and got his start in targeted advertising by developing a campaign for a car dealer.

"It was hugely successful," said Mr. Kahl. "It was my first foray into targeted advertising."

The opportunity came about while he was working as a quasi-apprentice at a print shop, and decided to test his interest in computing and data analysis on behalf of an auto-dealer client. The idea was to send mailers featuring the latest models of cars previous customers had purchased.

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It's conventional wisdom that Democrats lucky enough to get the Obama campaign's data files are going to have a massive marketing advantage in upcoming elections.

And when Organizing for Action, President Barack Obama's data-savvy post-2012 campaign operation was established in January, it seemed to answer the question on every politico's mind: Where will the data go? But a direct transfer of the coveted Obama data from campaign to nonprofit is not so simple -- not by a long shot.

Exactly where the Obama 2012 data lives is complex, in some cases still undetermined, and mostly obscured. The receptacle for some of the information -- which included voter-file data, social-media data, ad interaction and measurement information, email data, polling data, volunteer-profile data and competitive intelligence on GOP contender Mitt Romney's media buys -- remains unsettled in part because Federal Election Commission rules on coordination and campaign financing prevent the old Obama for America campaign from porting everything lock-stock-and-barrel to the new OFA that spun out of it.

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Retailer strategies leveraging data can have a personal effect on buying habits sooner than you know it.

From the perspective of a modern retailer, data is pushing pricing and promotion strategies in two directions -- toward both national and personal pricing. Data insights, retailer infrastructure and consumer tools are developing quickly but unevenly. This gives innovative retailers an opportunity to shape the pricing and promotion practices of the future, all the while technologists are keen to develop new tools to disrupt those plans.

Yet, on the front end, consumers expect an omni-channel retail experience. In a recent survey by Empathica, more than half of smart phone users admit to using their mobile devices to do research product prices. When this research happens real-time in stores, it is commonly referred to as "Showrooming." And as such, these consumers are currently better informed than the retailers in many aspects.

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Legendary Yankees closer Mariano Rivera may be known for sauntering to the mound to Metallica's foreboding "Enter Sandman," but it's the fans of the National League club to the south in Queens who dig metal bands. That's one of the tidbits gleaned by ad-intelligence outfit Exponential Interactive, which tracked 1.3 million baseball fans gearing up for the season last month online.

People who root for the New York Mets are also more likely to work in construction than fans of other teams, according to the Exponential data. It's a portrait not unlike the stereotype of the blue-collar Mets fan.

People who checked out Yankees-related content online also appear to fit some stereotypes associated with fans of the team with the highest payroll. They are more likely to earn $250,000 or more annually -- more than fans of any other Major League ball club. And, as superstar second baseman Robbie Cano signs with novice agent Jay Z -- whose hip-hop tune "Empire State of Mind" has become somewhat of a Yankees anthem -- it comes as no surprise they are more likely to appreciate rap music. They're also 24 times more likely to seek information on tax preparation, according to the tax- and spring-training-season study.

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Understanding the pools of information pouring into the databases of Starbucks has become a major focus at the international brew chain, even though its high-profile CEO doesn't much care for it.

"Howard [Schultz] doesn't care about data. He has absolutely no head for data," said Joe LaCugna, director of analytics and business intelligence at Starbucks during a session at the Big Data Retail Forum in Chicago today.

So, Mr. LaCugna makes sure to relay the important takeaways from his team's data analysis to Mr. Schultz. He saves the quant talk for colleagues, like the ones he sits down with during pizza lunch-and-learns.

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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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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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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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Once, data was the sole province of media agencies. But now ad agency holding companies are attempting to spread big-data smarts around, allowing PR, creative and of course digital shops to benefit from software that cleans, stores, measures and uses data for audience targeting.

At Omnicom Media Group, there are now hundreds of people focused on data. "The overall ambition is that we'll become a horizontal marketing technology arm across all of Omnicom," said Scott Hagedorn, who leads OMG's digital data and analytics group Annalect as CEO. "I'd give it another two years."

Annalect, split between an enterprise-software group and a practice with programmatic trading and global search, has invested heavily in talent from Wall Street and companies like KBMG. Omnicom CEO John Wren "wants to make it the Bloomberg of marketing," Mr. Hagedorn said.

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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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Robin Ross, Associate Director of CulinaryKraft Foods Group

What is the household penetration of parchment paper? It's a typical query thrown to Ms. Ross, who oversees the marketer's "pantry study," conducted every four years to determine the most commonly used ingredients and cookware. Kraft surveys 2,000 households using an eight-page questionnaire. The data guides Kraft as it develops recipes, package instructions and products. Some recent insights: People are using smaller skillets and more ethnic spices. As for parchment paper, while usage is on the rise, it's still not omnipresent. So Kraft stuck with foil when developing recipes for its new Fresh Take brand of cheese and seasoned breadcrumbs.

Nick Lundquist, Director of National AccountsSierra Nevada

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There's a lot of buzz about digital, but the big-brand dollars are still on TV. That's why Group M's media-buying platform, Xaxis, is taking a broadcast-style approach to enhancing its video-ad business, hoping to spread the $62 billion that went to TV in 2011.

The WPP-owned firm has embarked on tying TV viewing to other platforms to demonstrate consistency in audiences and to better measure cross-channel campaigns -- especially when it comes to connecting digital video ads to TV. Christina Beaumier, Xaxis VP-product development, believes matching actual TV programming schedules to set-top box data from WPP-owned I-Behavior is key to achieving that goal.

The idea is to track set-top box data, which could show that a viewer saw a particular spot during a specific show. Xaxis uses Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings and ComScore's Validated Campaign Essentials, noted Ms. Beaumier, "so broadcast teams know they are buying the same type of user across platforms."

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On an icy January day, more than 75 ad-industry executives made their way to the upper Manhattan campus of City College of New York for a brainstorming session. Sitting in the 106-year-old Shephard Hall -- an homage to the past, as one of the oldest Gothic campus buildings in the U.S. -- the group came together to determine what would be the ideal marketing executive of the future.

City College will have a new graduate program in the fall semester for branding and integrated communications, or BIC, and professor and program director Nancy Tag was convening a brainstorming group of executives from mobile, interactive, public relations, branding, creative and human resources to determine what skills were going to be most important to teach.

The conclusion? The next-generation advertising exec will be a data geek with the soul of an artist, the business acumen of Warren Buffet and the storytelling skills of Don Draper. Importantly, the group zeroed in on data analysis and management as a crucial skill still lacking in many marketers and one that's not being taught in many traditional marketing programs. Data scientists and people who are good at statistical analysis aren't often the types interested in a marketing career.

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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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Social data is the nectar all brands want to drink, but tapping into the source can be a costly and arduous undertaking.

Consider Facebook and Twitter, the suppliers with the most scale to offer. They have drastically different approaches when it comes to meting out access to the millions of conversations occurring daily on their platforms. And in Twitter's case, the approach seems subject to constant change.

Twitter's "firehose" of tweets is already an important revenue stream for the company, and it takes a cut from sanctioned resellers that furnish raw data to enterprise customers. But it's also been looking to restrict the firehose access of existing partners. Facebook, meanwhile, has nothing resembling a firehose and keeps the majority of conversations taking place on its pages under wraps. Brands that want to know what's being said about them can use listening tools to tap into public posts that haven't been hidden by privacy settings, but no more.

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Brad Rencher believes that one day data will be listed as an asset on the corporate balance sheet. The senior VP-general manager of digital marketing at Adobe may be dreaming, but his prognostication is inspired by a very real premise: The value of data is on the rise. And, like any other raw material, its value is directly correlated with the desire for protection and control of that material -- setting up an epic tussle over ownership and monetization.

Boundaries are being drawn in the data-control war. Brands and website publishers are taking steps to maximize the worth of the information they glean about their customers and site visitors. Social-media platforms are reining in access to their data. And consumers are being given more options to restrict access to their data as tensions escalate between privacy advocates and the ad industry.

Twitter and Facebook have gone to court to seize their precious data, shutting off access to some third-party partners. Google's been forced by the Federal Trade Commission to cede data control to less formidable foes. And the biggest digital-ad trade group called a recent move by Firefox maker Mozilla, blocking access to online consumer data, akin to atomic warfare -- or, specifically "a nuclear first strike against [the] ad industry," per a tweet from Mike Zaneis, senior VP-general counsel of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

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Facebook is reportedly planning to adopt one of Twitter's seminal features, the hashtag, a move that could put the two companies more directly in competition for ad dollars.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is testing out an integration that would enable users to click on a hashtag and be sent to a page where conversations around that topic would be grouped, akin to how Twitter search functions.

There are obvious implications for ad targeting, since Facebook will theoretically now have a much better signal to identify highly engaged TV viewers watching a real-time event like the Oscars or the NBA Finals if hashtags are widely adopted.

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Traditional data firms with troves of historical customer information from the largest brands in the world are infiltrating the digital ad market, and Acxiom may be the most aggressive of the bunch. The firm is at this week's annual gathering of the online ad industry's largest trade group, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, in Phoenix. Its latest push puts Acxiom squarely in the wheel house of the IAB's core membership, digital publishers.

The company aims to connect the data it stores for its clients -- purchase history, loyalty card information, categorical interests, and brand affinity, along with demographic, household income data, media consumption data and other information -- to publisher sites. To do that, Acxiom hopes to convince publishers to add its "Abilitag" to their sites.

Two multinational advertisers are currently using the system, which went into testing in December, according to Tim Suther, Acxiom's chief marketing and strategy officer.

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Online review platform Bazaarvoice calls itself a social-commerce firm and for years it has been the engine powering consumer reviews on hundreds of retail sites using its product-review engine. But under the hood it's also a consumer-data collection machine -- and that's coming in handy as it builds out a division called Media Labs, which will pump out detailed consumer-profile data based on the product reviews shoppers write and peruse.

"The reason why Bazaarvoice is involved in media is we have tons of data," said Andy Chen, VP of retargeting at the firm.

The company has signed up media agency execs to sit on an advisory board including Stephanie Gay, partner, digital media at MediaCom; Jon Hsia, head of media investment at Mindshare; and Steve Katelman, director of global strategic partnerships at OMD. The advisors were corralled with the help of Donnovan Andrews, VP Bazaarvoice Media Labs, and an alum of agencies including Tribal Fusion, Deutsch and OMD.

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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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Use a loyalty card for discounts at the drug store? The ads you see on Facebook could start looking familiar.

Facebook is testing out a new kind of ad targeting that will let brands market to users based on what they've bought in stores, according to execs briefed on their plans.

Facebook is partnering with data giants including Epsilon, Acxiom and Datalogix to allow brands to match data gathered through shopper loyalty program to individual Facebook profiles, much like it's done previously with marketers' customer data from their CRM databases. Datalogix, a company with a rich trove of loyalty-program data, gained notice last fall after Facebook partnered with the firm to decipher whether users exposed to ads on the social network ended up buying any of those products in stores.

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