How Big Data Analytics will save Consumers

 When someone speaks about presenting data that gives the wrong impression, what comes to my mind is modern marketing, and how it has gotten to the point where many of us have become conditionally skeptical about just about every advertisement that is presented to us.

I think governments, particularly in the US, should have even more regulatory oversight on what advertisers tell us about their products.

Misleading Advertising

Most commercials on television and other media, in my opinion, convey incomplete, misleading, or sometimes even false information to consumers. In a country were freedom of speech is celebrated as a basic right, some seem to use it however for their financial gain. See nine most misleading product claims.

I remember shortly after the 2008 financial crisis; a particular investment advisory firm had a series of commercials on both CNN and FOX, predicting the imminent and complete collapse of the US economy, and directing consumers to go to their website to learn how to so-called protect themselves.

They should have said, go to my website so you can learn how to send me some more of your money.

Frankly, if you are going to warn people of the impending collapse of the US economy as a basis of making a profit for yourself; then you can’t be perceived as having a high level of integrity. You will have to provide the information freely, or, run for political office to influence policy. Well, on second thought... just provide the information freely; sometimes running for office makes you become part of the problem.

Even with the pharmaceutical firms who have a regulatory requirement to disclose the side-effects of their products; I always get a bit of a chuckle watching their commercials. How they strongly and expressively describe the benefits, showing how happy and content the people are who use their drug products, while simultaneously describing the deadly side-effects.

To the unsophisticated consumer, which unfortunately is the majority of us, this can have a tremendous impact on our finances, health, and emotional, physical and social well-being — not to mention our very existence.

The obesity epidemic in the US is in part the result of false advertising, or at a minimum, advertising without providing complete information.

If advertisers were completely honest, they would tell us that if we consume their processed food products more than a few times per week over a certain period, we will likely put on forty pounds, and will be battling heart disease, diabetes, or other health issues in the not so distant future. They would tell us that we are better off using a traditional broom and mop, rather than the electronic cleaning devise with the near toxic cleaning solution that they try to sell us.

Impact of Big Data Analytics

Data analytics has transformed many fields, including Biology, where we have gone from molecules, to genetics, to systems; Sports, where Lebron James, uses data analytics to make decisions on the court — elevating his game, and is as much an expert on leveraging it, as he is a player; Medicine, where we have not yet even scratched the service of what is possible; and Finance, where only a computer can lose or gain $10,000,000 per minute, and where banks are constructing better consumer risk forecasts to increase their profits, as well as strengthening information security.

The good news is that it will not be long before us as ordinary consumers will have the same tools (that are used by both advertisers and politicians to sell us stuff) at our disposal — providing us with even greater ability to analyze or decipher potentially false or misleading information. And no, I am not talking about a Google search, going to Wikipedia, or reading online customer ratings and consumer reports here.

Consumers will be able to have the information at an instant, utilizing powerful tools that are driven by big data analytics. I believe these tools will come in the form of advanced specialized apps running from the cloud on cognitive overhead systems like IBM Watson, leveraging computers that utilize multi-core parallelism infrastructure, aggregation of other consumer experiences, machine learning, and multi-aspect summarization techniques to predict whether a new product will be successful, and whether existing products are safe, or worth purchasing.

In fact, we have already started to see this with sites like trivago. This site help consumers choose the best price and quality hotels through their metasearch technology engine, which compares prices of over 1,000,000 hotels from more than 200 booking sites, such as Expedia, Booking.com, and Priceline.com. Another is TrueCar — an automotive pricing and information website and complimentary app for new and used car buyers and dealers.

Technology like these will not only allow consumers to sort and filter information, but will also allow them to instantly analyze or decipher potentially false advertising, without having to do significant research on the contents of a product, or thumb through lengthy consumer reports, customer ratings, or reviews.

Even digital assistance tools like Siri, Google Now, Cortana, Voice Answer, and Amazon Echo, may all eventually have a significant play in this space.

We can look at these tools as a bit of a control on "unbridled" capitalism.

Stay tuned folks — this is just the beginning.

David W Graham is an international business operations, technology and information security risk management consultant, program manager, IT auditor, and a process analytics engineer based in South Florida, USA. He now serves as a Technology Operational Risk Consultant at Wells Fargo.