Press Release - October 2009
Any head of data planning will tell you that data is an unstoppable force in the future of marketing and hence the fortunes of the agency. But are they right and what opportunities are on offer?
As well as changing media habits forever the ‘Digital Revolution’ is creating, through interaction, a tsunami of volunteered information potentially far more insightful than traditional transactional data, and through connectivity a plethora of touchpoints across which to use it to engage consumers.
Such digitisation means that as we go about our daily lives it is all but impossible to avoid leaving behind a data footprint. By 9.07am today I had swiped my Oyster card, scanned my Tesco Clubcard, logged onto my internet banking account, searched in Google and responded to an Amazon e-mail to purchase a recommended book. Welcome to the data age!
Such vast amounts of data with the increased capacity to store it and the improved capability to analyse it have fundamentally changed the world we live in, not to mention the rules of marketing. The implications of how clients and agencies must adapt are profound.
How companies use this mass of customer data will become part of their brand promise. People already have deepening concerns about how their information is used and how secure it is. Brands will need to develop transparent policies that are open about how data is stored, explain how customers benefit from providing it and offer an opportunity to manage it. They will also need to provide a clear value exchange to increasingly savvy customers who understand the importance of their information.
How effectively marketers leverage this data in the future will determine the success of their campaigns and ultimately their careers. In the near future all media will become more targetable and accountable, with sophisticated combinations of information facilitating connections between exposure to communications and purchasing behaviour. This developing understanding of what works will change marketing practice forever, with the medical profession providing a fascinating glimpse of the future. The rise of evidence-based medicine facilitated by search engine technology and predictive-analytics has made it possible to scan through tens of thousands of studies in seconds to identify the right diagnosis - increasingly practitioner expertise is giving way to data-based decision making.
The 'Data-Age' presents agencies with enormous opportunities to get closer to clients, to develop more compelling strategy, to deliver more relevant communications and to create more useful marketing.
Data literacy and competence must become second nature if we’re to continue to be indispensible to our clients. With marketers needing to be more evidence-based than ever to justify spend, the existence of simply more data is just as likely to trigger paralysis by analysis as more effective campaigns. Brands will need new capabilities to help them, some clients will be able to do this themselves, others won't and will look for partners to help them.
Agencies are faced with a number of challenges in monetising their thinking. Developing strategy worth paying for will require imaginatively synergising information from multiple sources – market research, transactional analysis, customer profiling, web analytics, econometrics, market research, etc. Agencies will then need to take this thinking and make it as exciting as the creative output - the best visualisation techniques have the potential to turn data into a compelling stor.
As part of the value exchange expected by consumers personalisation has become too powerful a driver to ignore. In return for their data they are demanding relevancy, or further engagement is unlikely. Agencies need to help clients achieve meaningful personalisation in their communications and to manage the increased complexity of execution in this new one-to-one world.
Whilst we can use data to get significantly better at our timing to 'interrupt' customers with more 'personal' messages, can we use it to provide them with more useful marketing? In the future the most successful brands and agencies will be those that look to use data to both the benefit of the customer as well as the organisation. In this respect both Amazon’s 'Recommended For You' and iTunes 'Genius' are far more interesting than branded downloadable widgets, as they leverage the dynamics of long-tail economics and present a potential direct marketing model for the future. The fact that they are not about communications is the point.
It will be interesting to see if agencies, by focusing their immense creativity on data, can leverage these opportunities. Whilst many technology companies see the exploitation of data as a primarily creative task and look to agency partners, there are plenty of other organisations - from management consultants to analytic agencies – who look to take a more direct approach to a greater share of client marketing budgets.
Taken from an article by Matthew Harris, Data and CRM Partner, Rapier, in Adland issue 27 October 2009
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