One of China’s biggest box office surprises in recent years was
Tiny Times, a 2013 film which took in US$11.9 million in the box office on its first day alone and spawned a series of sequels. Yet this movie was as much a result of market research and data analysis as it was artistry. The filmmakers tapped into Chinese social media networks to help determine the stars, director and marketing campaign that would most appeal to China’s younger generation. And the payout for this research was substantial.
This is one original example of the
use of big data in China. Big data is an often vague term that means harnessing the huge amount of information that is created through online activities and transactions to discover trends and make predictions. Big data is too big, too fast or too diverse to be analysed with traditional databases and software—instead, data scientists use advanced techniques and computing to build models that can process a huge amount of information.
“We can deal with hundreds of billions or trillions of data [points],” said Zhang Tong, the head of the Big Data Lab at Baidu, China’s largest search engine.
“This potential is very large, so for billions of dimensions, we can build very big models.”
Big data technologies are often used alongside other high-tech innovations like cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
Though big data has blossomed only in the last five years, it is already being used in China in fascinating new ways. For example, Baidu is using big data to track and project patterns in disease, which can help hospital administrators make vaccines or schedule staff. Tencent, the tech giant that runs China’s largest mobile chat network, WeChat, is using social data to identify the trendsetters among groups of friends, and target marketing spending on those people. Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, is using a wealth of financial information from its Taobao and Alipay programmes to figure out which small businesses are worthy of a loan.
Some critics say big data is over-hyped, and that may be true.
Li Yang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, said companies in China today are more into using big data to attract media and investors.
