Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres

Author:Ian Ayres
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780553904130
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-08-27T18:30:00+00:00

Trading in Data

The willingness of states to sell information on the race of their own citizens is just a small part of the commercialization of data. Digitalized data has become a commodity. And both public and private vendors have found the value of aggregating information. For-profit database aggregators like Acxiom and ChoicePoint have flourished. Since its founding in 1997, ChoicePoint has acquired more than seventy smaller database companies. It will sell clients one file that contains not only your credit report but also your motor-vehicle, police, and property records together with birth and death certificates and marriage and divorce decrees. While much of this information was already publicly available, ChoicePoint’s billion dollars in annual revenue suggests that there’s real value in providing one-stop data-shopping.

And Acxiom is even larger. It maintains consumer information on nearly every household in the United States. Acxiom, which has been called “one of the biggest companies you’ve never heard of,” manages twenty billion customer records (more than 850 terabytes of raw data—enough to fill a 2,000-mile tower of one billion diskettes).

Like ChoicePoint, a lot of Acxiom’s information is culled from public records. Yet Acxiom combines public census data and tax records with information supplied by corporations and credit card companies that are Acxiom clients. It is the world’s leader in CDI, consumer data integration. In the end, Acxiom probably knows the catalogs you get, what shoes you wear, maybe even whether you like dogs or cats. Acxiom assigns every person a thirteen-digit code and places them in one of seventy “lifestyle” segments ranging from “Rolling Stones” to “Timeless Elders.” To Acxiom, a “Shooting Star” is someone who is thirty-six to forty-five, married, no kids yet, wakes up early and goes for runs, watches Seinfeld reruns, and travels abroad. These segments are so specific to the time of life and triggering events (such as getting married) that nearly one-third of Americans change their segment each year. By mining its humongous database, Acxiom not only knows what segment you are in today but it can predict what segment you are likely to be in next year.

The rise of Acxiom shows how commercialization has increased the fluidity of information across organizations. Some large retailers like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart simply sell aggregate customer transaction information. Want to know how well Crest toothpaste sells if it’s placed higher on the shelf? Target will sell you the answer. But Acxiom also allows vendors to trade information. By providing Acxiom’s transaction information about its individual customers, a retailer can gain access to a data warehouse of staggering proportions.

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