• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 29, 2012

The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health announced a joint program seeking new techniques aimed at big data management and analysis, stemming from the rise of digital data. Other government agencies also announced similar programs.

The project, underway since 2010, doesn't specifically name Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook or Twitter services as contributors, but it does attribute the "explosion of online content and service offerings" to many sources across the Web, including video, email and social networks.

Representatives from the government agencies said the initiative will  support access to information that leads to more informed decisions, similar to strategies underway in the online advertising industry to share and use data.

Data has been called the "new currency" by a variety of advertising and marketing executives, but tools and processes are needed to turn the bits and bytes into services the industry can use to transact business.

Joint initiatives that pull data out of silos and combine them can become tricky. In the online ad industry, executives, such as Kalyan Lanka, director of product management at Lotame, believe partnerships and with Acxiom, Alliant, Bizo, and Dataline allow the group of companies to combine resources to create new audience targets and reach.

Lotame makes it possible for publishers to use data from other sources and verticals to make their own audience more attractive to advertisers. Lanka suggests combing data from a variety of vertical markets. Integrating click stream, messaging, search queries, and data from brands and a variety of third-party companies opens the door for brands to target consumers in other market segments.

At the 4 As conference in Los Angeles earlier this week, a panel of execs from agencies, trading desks and demand side platform agreed that the missed opportunity in the ad industry resides in not using specific internal data from big brands. The data within sales, CRM, and enterprise resource planning platforms has not been applied to media buying to make advertising and marketing more effective.