We live in a digital world, with the world’s 2 billion internet users sending an estimated 200 billion emails, watching or uploading 48 hours of YouTube videos and adding nearly 700,000 Facebook posts every minute of every day. It’s estimated that the volume of data we add to the internet will only continue to grow, multiplying by 300 times by the end of this decade. And that’s digital gold.

Thanks to advanced data analytics software, markets can do a pretty good job of guessing how old you are, if and when your parents divorced, you sexual orientation, whether or not you’re pregnant and just about anything else simply by the data you upload to the web. And as the world becomes “smarter,” where thinks like your television, thermostat and even your refrigerator use sensors to gather data which is sent to your smartphone, marketers have an ever growing trove of data to sift through.

The fact that advertisers are able to use all of that data to tailor ads directly to you is a big reason why the post office has found itself in increasingly dire straits. Since peaking at 213 billion pieces of mail processed in 2006, postal volume fell to 177 billion in 2009 and is expected to come in at only about 150 billion in 2020. Why would an advertiser waste the money on a stamp when they can use information you’ve provided to make a specific pitch to you at a fraction of the cost?

Those same internet marketing trends have caused no end of upheaval with your local newspaper, if you still even have one. Inflation-adjusted advertising revenue at print newspapers fell by nearly two thirds from about $60 billion in late 1990s to $20 billion in 2011, levels last seen in the 1950s. That’s why newspaper layoffs and bankruptcies were such big news a couple of years back.

Jim Fink, chief analyst at our small-cap advisory Roadrunner Stocks, has actually found a bright spot amidst all that doom and gloom.

Harte-Hanks was founded in the early 1920s as a publisher of small-town Texas newspapers. By the 1970s, it had grown into a media conglomerate of 74 newspapers, radio and television stations and cable systems. While the company went public in the early 1970s to fund its empire building, it was taken private again in a 1984 leveraged buyout. To pay down its debt, it began selling off its broadcast stations and some of its weaker newspapers in favor in higher growth shopper local-advertising pamphlets and direct marketing businesses.

After going public again in 1993, then-CEO Larry Franklin recognized that newspapers were a mature business that weren’t likely to produce the strong revenue growth the company expected. As a result, by 1997 it had sold off the last of its newspapers and television stations – talk about foresight – to become a pure marketing company.

While the company still has some exposure to lower-margin direct mail advertising with its customer interaction division, it also provides services similar to a traditional advertising firm, manages contact databases and lead generation and operate contact centers. That arm of the company accounts for about 90% of revenue and two-thirds of profit.

While a smaller percentage of the business at just less than 10% of revenue, the real crown jewel is its Trillium Software. A big data business, Trillium is one of those programs that provides data discovery (tailoring marketing pitches based on known preferences), data quality assurance and cleaning, or scrubbing bad information from the system.

The software is widely recognized as an industry leader, a position that’s likely only to improve since Philip Galati was appointed as the division’s CEO in May. An IBM veteran, Galati was the executive director of Software-as-a-Service and Customer Success at the technology giant, so he brings an impressive array of technology and consulting expertise to Harte Hanks (NYSE: HSS).

While Jim Fink thinks the company has the potential to “return to its glory days,” its main attraction is that it is relatively undervalued at the moment, and pays a consistent 9 cent quarterly dividend for a 4.5% yield. That’s fairly unusual for a small-cap stock, particularly one that is position to provide at least modest growth for the foreseeable future as big data becomes the heart of advertising.

Talk about rising from the ashes of a dying industry.

Harte Hanks is just one of the dozens of small-cap stocks Jim covers in Roadrunner Stocks, some of which have more than doubled in value since he added them to his portfolios. And with 2015 expected to continue delivering steady economic growth and growing prosperity, this is likely to be another banner year for small-cap stocks which thrive when the economy is good. While small-caps can be volatile and tricky for investors, Jim’s guidance is sure to deliver market-beating results for your portfolio.