Dunk in the Dark

In the wake of the Super Bowl and the corresponding tweet by Oreo heard around the world mid-blackout – ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ – there’s been one hyphenated term on everyone’s lips: real-time. (If you’re thinking ‘Oreo, dunk in the dark, what?’ Check out this article and then get back to reading this blog post.)

Just skimming through my Google newsfeed today, I saw quite a few headlines about real-time. “Why all brands need to be real-time marketers.” “Real-time marketing should have been happening all along.” And our personal favorite: “I have seen the future of retail and it looks like an Oreo.” It’s pretty clear that this is the time for real-time.

Yet some people are doubting the real-time trend, because, yes, sometimes real-time messaging falls flat. You can’t just Photoshop Anne Hathaway into your last ad during the Oscars, push it out in real-time and expect to ‘Dunk in the Dark.’ Real-time marketing needs timeliness but it also needs analysis – it needs to be relevant – it needs to leverage real data.

This is an important thing to bear in mind as real-time hits the big time. More and more, companies are trending towards ‘in-flight’ decision-making and instantaneous action. Police departments are using real-time information to track crime and help combat it as it happens. Customer service representatives are accessing real-time data on the people they’re helping in order to anticipate needs and improve the customer experience. Real-time is great, but it needs to be leveraging real data. That’s why Rapleaf offers real-time Append and API services of our data.

As Oracle’s Hasan Rizvi explains, “You can think of the difference between Big Data and Fast Data as the difference between downloading a movie from an online store (and having to wait until the entire movie downloads in order to watch it) and streaming the same movie (where you can start watching it instantly). In either case, you’ll get to watch the movie. The difference is simply the amount of time you’ll wait before you can do it.”

And these days, more and more people don’t want to wait. After all, your Oreos are getting stale.