Left brain verses right, numbers versus pictures. What happens when numerical data exceeds the ability to provide useful information, not because it’s unsolvable, but because the amount of data is expanding so fast that meaning cannot be derived? Sure there is automation to help with the processing, but eventually that data has to be refined to into palatable representations. As marketing becomes more data driven it’s also important to remember it’s marketing’s goal to create emotional reactions.

Think of the Twitter cloud. While an extremely simple example, the Twitter cloud easily displays the biggest topics by increasing the size of the words relative to the number of times a particular word / phrase is mentioned. The data could have easily been presented in numerical results, “245,000 mentions of ice cream,” lifeless. Instead, we “feel” the importance of Ice Cream simply by visualizing its size relative to the other words. We are able to instantly compare the significance of the data based upon feeling, supported by raw numbers. Simple right? What about the fact that data is the fastest growing thing on this planet and its grown rate is actually beginning to exceed the performance abilities of the mediums it’s stored on.

Between the years 2000-2003, two economists at Berkley, Varian and Lyman, estimated that the total production of new information in the year 2000 alone reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year between 2000 and 2003. This is pre-facebook, twitter and MySpace, and look at the amounts of data in those three arenas alone.

Data visualization is crucial to connecting emotional depth with an increased understanding of numbers, especially as we begin to tackle staggering amounts of data. It provides the bridge to communicate the meaning and emotion of the data. It can even bridge the communication gaps that exist between data analysts (left brain) and creative marketing leaders (right brain). The future of marketing relies on both, equally.

Interactive Data Visualization: The following image is a snapshot from Fidg’t, a Java-based desktop application that visualizes a user’s social network using Flickr and LastFM tags. More than just a simple data visualization tool, it allows you to interact with the visual elements and create dynamic relationships from complex data sets and meta-tagging. Simply put, it provides emotional meaning to the data.