Computers are once again transforming the business of marketing. This time, though, the change is being driven by cloud computing and the processing of huge amounts of data about what customers do and what they desire.

“The profile of a chief marketing officer used to be someone who wore a black turtleneck and worked at Nike, but now increasingly it’s someone who studied math and worked at a hedge fund and then got very involved in data-driven marketing,” said Glenn Kelman,

chief executive of Redfin, the online real estate brokerage firm. “Now the phrase I hear is, ‘We need a Moneyball marketer.’ ”

For consumers, the result is personalized marketing.

Ideally, consumers do not notice the computing and data-crunching in the background and instead just see more relevant messages from brands, said Ian Schafer, chief executive and founder of Deep Focus, a digital agency. But when marketing is too personalized, it can feel creepy.

Behind the scenes, the data analysis is handled by a wide array of cloud services companies. The companies collect data, compare it with data from the past, and determine how to use it and how the final product the consumer will see should look. They include Adobe, BloomReach, Axiom, Epsilon, BlueKai, IBM, Oracle, Salesforce and Teradata.

“Because a lot of these things now are hosted in the cloud, marketers can make changes and really control that experience and what they show to the consumer in real time,” said John Mellor, vice president for business development and strategy for the Adobe Marketing Cloud, whose clients include Audi, Disney and Dell.

The astonishingly fast consumer shift to mobile devices has made these tools even more necessary, Mr. Schafer said.

The new kind of marketing is a technological challenge that also has major business consequences, said Peter Lee, who oversees Microsoft Research. “Small changes in the behavior of these systems make gigantic revenue differences,” he said.

But for employees who are used to the old marketing methods, the shift has sometimes been difficult. One area of conflict has been between marketing departments and I.T. departments, which once controlled the technology employees used but no longer always do.

“It creates a ton of tension because marketing iterates and is very experimental, and I.T. wants stability and security,” said Joelle Kaufman, director of marketing and partnerships at BloomReach, a cloud marketing company.

Another concern among some marketers is that technology is threatening the heart and soul of their work — creativity, intuition and art.

“There is a bit of an overemphasis on big data sometimes,” Ms. Khatibloo said. “What we don’t want to have happen is to use this very scientific tool and make creative directors go away. Data has given precision and a lot more science to these fields, but I don’t think we should do away with intuition entirely.”

Source: bits.blogs.nytimes.com