As someone who has just left the advertising industry, and was doing data stuff, the real issue is that a lot of companies have a lot of data but almost none of it has any actual useful information content in it. It’s a bit of a hard concept to explain to explain to people because they go “but there’s a hundred something columns, and hundreds of millions of rows!”, you can have all the data you want, but if it’s all non-indicative trash you’re not going to be able to usefully predict anything, but hey, you’ve hired a data scientist now and added the cost of a big spark cluster to your AWS bill now, so you may as well continue telling the market you’ve got some real hot stuff.

Yes, agreed. Lots of useless data out there that doesn't really have significant signals. Also a lot of it is duplicated with everyone getting the same logs, so I find it hard to believe that any single company magically derived a big advantage over another.

Not to mention, no amount of AI powered results can beat a slick sales team. $1M spent on quality salesperson is much higher ROI than $1M on fancy AI engineering when it comes to relationship-powered media spend.

In statistics, there's a classic quote by John Tukey "The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data."

This should be printed in large letters on the wall of anybody claiming to do data science.