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The expansion of the mobile marketplace over the last decade has brought companies access to exponentially more data than they previously had on consumer behaviors and desires. Too much data, as it turns out. Collecting meaningful data has become a major challenge. The old tools simply may not work. In a new paper, George Day , Co-Director of the Mack Center for Technological Innovation and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School , says there is a dangerous gap between the potential value of all the data and the capacity of companies to adequately analyze that data: The hypothesis that organizations are not keeping pace with market velocity and complexity is more difficult to test. Suggestive evidence comes from several sources. The first is the vast literature on information overload, which describes how an excess of information has resulted in the loss of the ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks (Eppler and Mengis 2004; Klingberg 2009; Meyer 1998). The second is the equally large literature on organizational adaptation in the face of environmental change (ranging from Miles and Snow [1978] to Hamel [2007]). Still, there is no longitudinal measure of the size of the gap. Some evidence comes from recent estimates that the amount of data available expanded at an exponential rate from 100 billion gigabytes in 2005 to 1000 billion gigabytes in 2010 (IDC 2007). This suggests an even greater rate of growth than Davenport and Harris’s (2007) claim that unique information per person is growing at 50% per year. In contrast, they estimate that information consumption per person is only growing at 2% a year. Taken together, a reasonable case can be made that the deluge of data has run up against the barrier of the limited ability of people and organizations to process it. The evidence sug- gests that the volume of inbound data and the proliferation of channels is going to continue for the foreseeable future. Absent any breakthroughs in human beings’ ability to process data, unless new tools and approaches are adopted, the gap will continue to grow. There are other reasons to suggest that the gap is growing and that new approaches are needed to begin closing it. During periods of technological disruption, most organiza- tions have trouble keeping pace. This is true of the effect of the Internet and cheap, ubiquitous communication technologies on the habits and behaviors of consumers and the creation of new business models for reaching these markets. The tendencies toward inertia and sclerotic decision making are fed by lag effects and organizational rigidities. Read the full paper here . And watch Day and colleague David Reibstein discuss the "data deluge" problem in this Knowledge@Wharton interview:

Just a decade ago, video was off limits for most businesses. Connecting with customers required placing ads on television, and that required writing big checks. No small business could afford to use so much of its budget on producing, never mind buying all those ad slots. But YouTube changed the game. And now businesses of all sizes can utilize video as a point of entry for customers. In today's New York Times business section, Kermit Pattison writes about the opportunities that online video provides: Online video is becoming a first stop for many customers. It is akin to what the Web page was a decade ago — something that can give early adopters an edge over competitors. It gives them a channel to talk directly to customers in ways previously accessible only to large companies that could afford TV advertisements. And Pattison provides a useful guide for small business owners. And here are six action items Pattison suggests: Show your products, Create a destination, Use analytics and tools, Build a brand channel, Advertise with video, and Offer instruction. Read detailed descriptions of each of these action items in Pattison's article, here .

In today's New York Times , past all the election day coverage, Kevin O'Brien has an interesting report on cellphone maker Nokia's success in building strong customer loyalty in some of the world's poorer developing communities. It appears that while Nokia has lost ground in the smartphone market, the company's focus on poorer customers has netted it some remarkable success. And one of the ways the company has built brand loyalty is by offering services that allow people who can not afford internet connectivity to have quick access to helpful information, like market data and commodity prices. O'Brien: Since 2009, 6.3 million people have signed up to pay Nokia for commodity data in India, China and Indonesia. On Tuesday, Nokia plans to announce that it is expanding the program, called Life Tools, part of its Ovi mobile services business, to Nigeria. With 152 million residents, Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country. But, Nokia says, only 29 percent of the Nigerian population owns a cellphone, although other figures place the level higher because some phones are shared. While media coverage of the mobile industry tends to focus on the fast-growing and lucrative smartphone market, 77 percent of all cellphones sold in the third quarter were simpler models, capable of little more than text messaging . Two-thirds of the globe’s 4.6 billion mobile phone users live in emerging markets, where Nokia is the market leader with a 34 percent share, according to Strategy Analytics. By selling valuable price data at a relatively low cost, Nokia is blending commercial and humanitarian goals to attract the next generation of upwardly mobile phone users. Read Nokia Taking a Rural Road to Growth here .

Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom says "the marketer has truly become the media owner." With technology lowering "cost of entry" dramatically in the digital age, some marketers are now able to take their messages directly to consumers. In this Ad Age video, Bloom discusses some of the recent success marketers have had, and suggests these are not exceptions, but signs of a larger trend: