July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The National Rifle Association has rolled out a 3D shooting app for players to take target practice.

That’s ironic because the pro-gun lobby has been highly critical of video games that feature guns and shooting. A week after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre (pictured above) blamed video games and the media for the tragedy. At a press conference, LaPierre said “vicious, violent games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and Splatterhouse” led to real-world violence.

On the one-month anniversary of the school shooting, the NRA has released its own iPhone and iPad app, “NRA: Practice Range.” The iTunes rating system suggests that it’s appropriate for children as young as 4-years-old to play.

The free app claims to instill “safe and responsible ownership through fun challenges and realistic simulations.” It dispenses information about gun safety before users can take aim and fire. It costs 99 cents to upgrade a firearm from a free M9 to a Beretta, a Browning, or a Colt.

Related: Read our op-ed on the TrackingPoint “lock and launch” sniper rifle, which appeared last week at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Half of retailers can’t aggregate all their data in one place to make detailed reports and conclusions. 45 percent don’t use available data to personalize marketing communications, and another 42 can’t link data together at the individual customer level.

That is perhaps understandable, because 90 percent of the data that’s ever been created has been created in the last two years, and the rate of data growing is increasing quickly.

But it is also a problem, because big data is the key to knowing your customers, and knowing your customers is the key to being able to sell effectively to them. Big data also has its creepy side, as when Target famously used it to figure out that a girl was pregnant before her father knew.

But many retailers are not effectively pulling together tweets, likes and reviews and matching them against customer lists, transactions, loyalty club memberships, and prospects — which means they are using old dumb marketing techniques in a new smart world.

And missing out on sales.

So online marketing optimization company Monetate, which has access to a huge amount of ecommerce information, has put together the following quick guide for retailers using big data:

photo credit: JD Hancock via photopin cc