
But in today's terms, predictive marketing, based on predictive analytics, amounts to much more than hoping and believing that a home-maker will buy dish soap in the very near future.
It's real, and it has been for a few years, said John Young, Chief Analytics Officer at Epsilon.
Epsilon runs analytics against hundreds of millions of demographic and anonymized web-browsing records to help customers make optimal marketing decisions.
Jerry Jao of Retention Science puts predictive analytics at the core of knowing which customers are likely to abandon a brand—and how to retain them.
It feels a lot more real today than a year or two ago, when everyone wanted to sound cool, he told me.
The problem is that if it's historic data—even just a month old—it's probably now a list of credit card owners.