Beyond the Obsession with Digital Data
In recent years, we’ve witnessed a growing fascination with digital data. Every click, search, or interaction on a platform leaves a trace, and businesses have become increasingly reliant on those signals to understand their customers and refine their strategies. This is powerful and necessary. But the obsession with “native digital” data has, in many cases, led to an underestimation of something equally critical: the direct, present, and often analog act of collecting information in real life.
Think about a tradeshow. It’s noisy, messy, full of chance encounters and informal conversations. And yet, those interactions often reveal insights that no dashboard can capture: what questions people ask, what doubts they express, what competitors they mention, what product features catch their eye. These fragments of reality don’t arrive pre-structured, tagged, or datified. This requires listening carefully, taking notes, and later, of course, turning them into structured data and useful inputs for our systems. Yet the real value lies in the eyes and analytical skills of the person observing.
Turning Human Encounters into Data
That “later” step is crucial. Data collected on the ground is not valuable until it’s datified—organized, standardized, and integrated into the broader analytical framework. A conversation at a tradeshow booth becomes a data point once it’s recorded in a CRM. An observation about market trends gains value once it’s categorized and shared across teams. Without this step, it remains anecdote.
And yet, many professionals are reluctant to engage in this kind of hands-on data collection. Their reasoning is simple: if it’s not already in digital format, it’s not worth the effort. They see digital platforms as self-sufficient engines of truth, ignoring the messy, imperfect, but deeply human ways in which information actually emerges.
The Power of Unstructured Data
The landscape has evolved. In the last decade, we’ve learned to manage unstructured data—images, videos, voice notes, social media comments, or customer service transcripts—thanks to Big Data technologies, natural language processing, and advanced analytics. These tools allow us to incorporate massive volumes of heterogeneous information that once seemed impossible to process. The mix of structured and unstructured data has enriched our capacity to detect patterns and anticipate behaviors.
Over the last decade, enormous capabilities have been developed to capture and datify information, especially with the rise of Big Data and advanced analytics. A key milestone was the ability to analyze massive volumes of unstructured data, which today represent more than 80% of the data generated daily. This includes text, images, videos, and conversations that contain valuable insights about behaviors, preferences, and trends that structured data alone cannot capture.
“Being aware of this, the point here is not to underestimate the importance of direct, in-person data collection—sometimes gathered in very informal ways.”
The quality of this capture often depends on the individual’s ability to observe, listen, and “read between the lines,” turning subtle signals into meaningful inputs.
Direct Observation Still Matters
Technology can help us process, classify, and even interpret signals at scale, but the sources of data remain diverse, and not all of them are digital. Direct observation—simply watching how a potential customer navigates a store, reacts to a demo, or hesitates before making a choice—still provides invaluable insights. Unlike digital traces, which show what people do, direct observation often reveals why they do it.
This is why the real advantage lies in the mix.
“Digital-native data gives us scale, precision, and immediacy. Unstructured data adds texture, emotion, and nuance. Field-collected data gives us context, signals, and subtleties we wouldn’t otherwise detect.”
From Data Points to Real Understanding
Organizations that embrace this full spectrum—listening actively in person, integrating unstructured sources, and capturing exhaustively online—are the ones that develop a competitive edge. They don’t just track what people do; they also understand why.
In a world increasingly enamored with automation and dashboards, the challenge is not to abandon face-to-face data collection, but to discipline ourselves to integrate it. Attend the tradeshow, ask the questions, observe carefully. Then take the time to transform those observations into structured data.
That’s where the real value emerges: in the ability to combine the immediacy of digital, the richness of unstructured sources, and the depth of the human encounter.
