Natural language processing of forum posts, complaints emails, OCR feeders from scanned communications.  Scans of competitors print adverts.  All can be processed much more simply than before.
CCTV footage , especially hi-def can take us beyond security to the point where we can tell what the customer looks at and where.  This allows better product placement.
From my experience "Big Data" gets used to build something that works to show that the impossible dream is actually real.  What happens next is refinement and refactoring so the same results can be achieved at much lower data volumes that may not actually use a big data technology