Of cookies and people: Honing in on people-based data | #MME16 by R. Danes | Apr 27, 2016 Companies stalking the moving target that is their customer have hotly anticipated new developments in Big Data — particularly those applicable to consumer behavior and purchasing. For the past 20 years, cookies have been the main source of information that companies have on their customers — but the remove from the person behind the cookie has led to disappointing performance. Luckily, according to David Skinner, VP of strategic alliances and partnerships at Merkle Group, Inc., a marketing agency specializing in data-based solutions, we are getting closer to being able to pinpoint actual people for marketing purposes. These days, “You don’t want to get a like from a cookie; what you want to get is a purchase from a person,” he said. To that end, you have to follow the more complex and messy trajectory of human users, not devices. He said statistics show that 60 percent of transactions that start on one channel or device complete on another, so spanning and connecting different channels is crucial. “The purchase funnel is dead,” Skinner told John Furrier (@furrier), cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Oracle Modern Marketing Experience event. “It’s really a purchase cycle,” he explained. “Someone can be fairly far along in that cycle and jump out to a competitor.” A well-oiled machine “Data is the oil of the information economy,” Skinner said, explaining that the company’s solutions are tied to ROI — they don’t get paid if they don’t perform — and data is what makes that kind of guarantee possible. James Mullarney, VP of global alliances and channels for Oracle Marketing Cloud, also spoke to theCUBE, and he concurred with Skinner. “It’s all about the data at the end of the day,” he said.