I thought the illuminating sidewalk and staircase in Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” music video were simply the coolest.

That is, until I saw the Lite-Brite set of stairs at Google's headquarters, each step glowing a different color and scrolling what I presume was a top search term for that day.

(Uma Thurman, Brian Williams and Jon Stewart must have been pretty popular that Wednesday.)

Upon stepping out of the cab, my first impression of the Mountain View, Calif., headquarters was that it had the feel of a hightech college campus.

This made sense — because inside the doors for Haystak Digital Marketing's 2015 Digital Summit being hosted at Google was an invaluable learning experience.

I had the good fortune of seeing presentations from Haystak founder Duncan Scarry, Google head of customer analytics Neil Hoyne and Autotrader president Jared Rowe.

Here's one point from Hoyne that struck a particularly strong chord with me: data will always beat intuition.

That should resonate with the auto industry, including the dealers, auctions, consignors, vendors, OEMs, etc., who work in the remarketing space.

There’s arguably more data at your fingertips than ever before — all to help you determine how your customers think, behave, shop and buy — and how you can best respond to them.

That brings to mind one of Rowe's points: Value is not created by data alone. Actionable insights bring the real value, but it requires true partnerships to extract that true potential.

This is good news for the remarketing business, which thrives these days on partnerships (i.e. the multiplatform buying and selling technology, for instance), and particularly those that promote data-directed decision-making.

You see, it's not just the King of Pop's walkway or Google's steps that illuminate.

The right kind of detailed data — plus the knowledge of how to use it and the partnerships to implement the best practices it uncovers — can teach us on how to best serve our customers.

This From the Editor column appeared in the March 15-31 issue of Auto Remarketing.