How to Filter the Storm of Information

Editor's note: Every Friday, we showcase a featured topic from our YouTube show, Altimetry Authority.

This week, we tackle themes from today's episode, which airs at 8 a.m. Eastern time.

Read on below to learn about today's flood of data... and a business that's cutting through the noise...

Steve King found a $326 million future in 157 million online conversations...

He didn't sell anything... At least, not at first. All he did was listen – to grocery-list gripes, cheeky memes, and niche blogs. If someone had an opinion, he wanted to hear it.

King came up through the ranks as a marketing executive who knew how to get a message to stick. But what set him apart was where he looked for answers.

While others relied on surveys and focus groups, King turned his attention elsewhere. He believed the real story was already being told... in online chatter the rest of the industry ignored.

All you had to do was look.

In 2011, King co-founded Black Swan Data to sort through the Internet's white noise...

He believed if he could mine that chaos correctly, he'd find the future hiding inside.

It didn't take long for King's project to get attention. Just four years later, Black Swan was hired to help an industry mainstay with a big problem.

Soda sales were shrinking fast as health-conscious consumers grew wary of sugar. Millennials were turning away from PepsiCo's (PEP) sugary drinks. Instead, they flocked to unsweetened, flavored sparkling water.

The leader in this once-niche category was LaCroix. The decades-old brand, with its neon cans and retro aesthetic, had become a cultural staple.

Pepsi wanted to challenge LaCroix's dominance. But it's notoriously tough to launch a new beverage line in such a saturated market.

So it turned to Black Swan.

Black Swan scraped 157 million conversations from across the web...

It tracked mentions of sparkling water and parsed consumer sentiment. It noticed how folks described taste, how they talked about health, and what kinds of packaging made them post a photo.

Sure enough, a pattern soon emerged from the noise. And in 2018, Pepsi released its answer to LaCroix – a zero-calorie, zero-sweetener sparkling water called Bubly.

The brand cracked $100 million in revenue in its first year. By 2019, it had generated $326 million in sales. Since then, competitors have rushed to catch up. But Bubly remains No. 1 for brand awareness in sparkling water.

As for Black Swan, it handed Pepsi a road map extracted from the ambient chatter of millions. Bubly's success proved that unconventional data – mined with the right tools and interpreted through the right lens – can deliver better insight than any focus group.

The world is producing more data today than ever before...

We're expected to create roughly 200 zettabytes of data this year – an amount so massive it's nearly impossible to conceptualize. A single zettabyte is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes.

Every tap, swipe, search, and voice command adds to the data pile.

And it's creating a great opportunity for companies that can capture this immense sea of data... and mold it into something digestible.

AI has become the only scalable way to process this flood. From summarizing articles to predicting consumer behavior, AI models are transforming noise into insight.

And that transformation is already reshaping industries, from health care to advertising to logistics.

Of course, rapid growth also brings familiar fears...

Many folks are now worried we're in a dot-com-style bubble. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – one of the most influential voices in AI today – even acknowledged the possibility.

Director of Research Rob Spivey and I take a closer look at the red-hot AI market in today's episode of the Altimetry Authority YouTube show.

You can check it out for free right here. (And be sure to click the "Subscribe" button.)

In times like these, discipline is more important than ever. Make sure you're looking in the right places for your next AI investment opportunity.

Companies that can turn all of this data into something useful will be some of the biggest winners.

Regards,

Joel Litman
September 5, 2025