Are we entering the data decade?

We recently came across this fantastic article from Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.

As well as sharing some great observations on the current economy, he also suggests that statisticians could well be the sexy job of the next 10 years...

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."

Taking that thought forward, then surely the sexy marketers of the next decade will be those that use the insights from that analysis to optimise their marketing activity?

You can read the full article and see the video here.

DP