"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today's column is written by Ken Rona, chief data scientist at IgnitionOne. There is a lot of excitement and some confusion across the ad industry around machine learning, and for good reason. The availability of cheap storage and processing has made sophisticated machine learning available to a much wider range of industries than what was available even five years ago. The media business has seen machine-learning solutions find homes in a wide variety of applications, from predicting how likely a user will click on an ad to classifying users in lookalike models and optimizing campaign delivery.

"It's the straw that stirs the drink," says Roger Barnette, president at IgnitionOne. "We started as a search company, so it seems natural to morph into more of a data business when you think about how the data impacts search." As Google and Bing build out their services, IgnitionOne will continue to focus on that data that supports ad-copy creation and ad targeting. It's also about modifiers based on a transaction and how search on a mobile phone in a specific geolocation supports clients like Bridgestone, Fiat, General Motors, LaQuinta, and Land Rover, which are listed as clients on the company's Web site. Perhaps the reason for the realignment shows up in the quarterly digital marketing report IgnitionOne publishes each quarter.