by flagamuffin

Not a very in-depth article, but one interesting to me due to the sheer oddity of intelligent people going into advertising.

The number of ad campaigns based on algorithms doubled last year versus 2011. In the coming years, they are expected to account for nearly half of all campaigns, according to Forrester Research. Meanwhile, this year the world’s catalog of digital data is expected to reach some 2.7 zettabytes—an amount of information so large it would take 700 billion discs to store it all.

By itself, all that data is useless, naturally. That’s why numbers people are in such high demand—not just any numbers people, but creative quants who can keep pushing online ads to the next, more sophisticated level. They are drawn to advertising not just for the job prospects but also for the creative challenge—and they’ll take a considerable pay cut versus similar jobs in financial services.