Who Runs The World? Data.

We live in an algorithmic world. Everything we do is digitally recorded and mapped out. A consumer's digital footprint allows marketers to understand their audience better and run targeted advertising.

In essence, we are data. Bits and portions of us tell us a lot about who we are.

And yes, there are privacy concerns, and yes, there are major areas that require regulatory control. Today most data is still captured through cookies which have lifetimes up to 8000 years (according to this study by Miller and Skiera).

How can data make advertising better? How data can help marketers sell their products?

A Conversation on Trust

Effective advertising is a conversation with your customers—  an ongoing relationship based on trust. The best companies get there by anticipating their customers’ needs. The lifeblood of this relationship is a delicate balance of art and science, creativity, and analytics.

Yes, innovation and data.

Technology innovation continues to drive media fragmentation, muddying the once clear cut segments of TV, radio and print. Advertisers must now divide their budgets among multi-screen touchpoints.

if you don't get creative to work with media and data, the premise and promise that you offer clients is more difficult to differentiate and more difficult to implement; data is central to marketing because it’s just so easy to store and move data these days.

Data fatigue

Before the internet, we had townhaller criers and who doesn’t remember a full mailbox? Catalogues of cleaning products and clothes often fell out.

Our environment is similar – we are inundated with mobile, personalized campaigns and hyper-targeted messages.  The advertising real estate for is squeezed into is a 5-inch screen and ads there elicit greater response than a desktop -because the probability of the user observing the ad increases.

With the sweet spot combination with thoughtful analytics around segment, intent, desire, brands can showcase different values to different customer segments.

The Data lies in the details

For data to be meaningful - decide your strategy.

Data generally accumulates rather than being something constructed. Making it useful requires calibration with data that is both clean and representative.

Data needs to be captured, analysed, value extracted from it and stored efficiently. Data doesn't add up to anything worthwhile if it cannot be mined to show predictions, results. The collection, storage and deciphering data are crucial in meet the marketing goals.

By segmenting the data using powerful analytics tools, you can break down your audience into different buckets.

Will XYZ, male, 20-24, traveller, online shopper, avid sports reader be more likely to buy a pocket square?

By deriving insight through robust analytics, it is easier to 'convert' a user to buy the product.

Data 360

What we call “enterprise marketing platforms” will take in data on the viewing and purchase behaviour of millions. Fed into software that combines elements of marketing models, attribution models, and other analytical tools, predictions are churned out by the nanosecond.

If enterprise marketing platforms are to do all these things successfully, we will need the right technology, the right analytics, and the right data. Today, the technology is approaching commodity status. The analytics are difficult but doable. The real challenge is the data and an individual psychogram per user.

Consumer privacy and security

Consumers as a whole may well appreciate that targeted ad on hotels or vacuum cleaners, some stats to chew on:

• In 2016, KPMG International revealed that 55 percent of consumers surveyed globally said they had decided against buying something online due to privacy concerns;
• Singaporean consumers felt the most defenceless among Asian respondents over the way organisations handle and use their personal information (36 percent), with just over 10 percent indicating that they had full or sufficient control;
• Hubspot reported that four out of five consumers have closed a browser or exited a website because of an autoplaying ad or a pop up, and 96% of consumers have unsubscribed from receiving emails.

In fact, the same KPMG study revealed that 83% of respondents agree that not all ads are bad, but they want to filter out irrelevant and intrusive ads and 77% agree that they would prefer to ad filter rather than completely ad block.

Accurate Data Collection

Identity-management challenges mean that not all data is accurate enough. An ad impression on a smartphone and a tablet: was it seen once by two people or twice by one person? In addition, some offline data is not as granular as it could be. Some data is not available quickly enough. And big data is typically both noisy and unrepresentative.

While there can be such a thing as too much categorization, businesses need to make sure to focus on the right kind of data - to target specific demographic relevant to the business with great precision.

For example Netflix saves $1 billion per year with predictive show-recommending algorithms, and a study by the Data-Driven Marketing Institute (DDMI) found that in 2012 the data-driven marketing economy (DDME) added $156 billion in revenue to the U.S. economy, fuelling more than 675,000 jobs.

OpenDNA offers an intelligent solution for customers to choose which websites can collect information about their browsing habits, and even what type of information these websites can collect.

By combining an integrated advertising strategy with big data, organizations can make greater impact in these 3 key areas:

• Customer engagement: Big data not just tells who your customers are, but where they are, what they want, how and when they want to be contacted. The key to getting the customer’s attention is to talk to them like they are the only one in the room
• Customer loyalty & retention: Big data can help you discover what influences customer loyalty and what keeps them coming back again and again. One of the most important values is consumers’ loyalty is driven by trust. Users when offered a totally transparent experience, with full control over their profile and personal data, they are masters of their experience, discovering valuable content along the way that makes every engagement a mutually rewarding one.
• Marketing optimization/performance: With big data, one can determine the optimal marketing spend across multiple channels, as well as continuously optimizing marketing programs through analysis, testing and measurement.

Big data today will not always be big enough the next second; gathering truly comprehensive data will involve negotiating with multiple owners who will share their data only with those they trust to keep it safe and use it impartially.