Surprisingly - according to estimates - more than 90% of all global data has been generated in recent years. It is also estimated that by 2025, people will daily produce 463 billion gigabytes of data. Following the statistics, in 2021, 4.66 billion people used the internet – about 60% of the population – and this number is growing, by hundreds of millions, every year. With the massive increase in usage, it is expected that by 2025, cloud services will have more than 200 zettabytes of data – 1 zettabyte = 44 trillion gigabytes.

Where does most of it come from?

In mid-1999, marketing data was primarily used to track sales transactions and analyze the impact of email campaigns. Today, data derived from "real people" is generated from a far greater number of sources: online purchases, clicks, search behavior, social media activity, geographic movement, and so on. What is happening is clear; brands want to serve their consumers more effectively in the digital world. To illustrate this, in 2021, nearly 70% of Instagram users viewed images and videos posted by brands.

At the same time, as the amount of data increases, its collection becomes more and more challenging with various consumer protection regulations (eg GDPR and ePrivacy) and changes in services. For example, changes in the way Apple and Facebook allow users to decide about their data are very welcome to consumers, but they decrease the possibilities for apps to collect data and make it harder to provide personalized services. These changes fundamentally affected marketing strategies, creating new challenges for the industry.

The quantitative plethora of information and its inevitable growth are major problems for today's professionals. No team has the physical capacity to process such a large amount of material, nor produce genuinely useful analyses. Fortunately, the digital world seems to recognize and find a way to overcome its own barriers, as many new smart products and services for data analysis have emerged, in order to support marketing workers, all over the world, and allow the real use of this lode.

Marketing and the need for data rules.

As far as data regulation is concerned, legislators and "decision makers" have also been active, although it is almost impossible to keep up with changes simultaneously across the world. The truth is that genuine exploration of user privacy and choices requires rules and regulations, as growth always increases the potential risk of misuse. The task of tech companies is to build data pipelines that ensure the trust and security of AI and analytics.

Undoubtedly, data is the new currency for businesses, and its overwhelming growth rate can be intimidating. The main challenge is to take advantage of them in a way that benefits marketers and, above all, customers. Fortunately, there are excellent services for this purpose, effective regulation to protect consumer rights, and an endless supply of information at our fingertips to create even better products. The key for companies is to adopt these technologies as soon as possible to avoid drowning in this ocean of information.