2014 is the year for marketers to shake the data paralysis
Marketers have been talking about data for years, but it’s time for more to start walking the walk argues Ken Breen.
Effective marketing is hard because, let’s face it, we are chasing a moving target. If we knew everything there was to know about a consumer then advertising would work perfectly and quite frankly it doesn’t.
However for the last decade our industry has missed the point: it’s not about the data, it’s about the customer, yet we are still asking decade’s old questions around the data itself.
Questions like how can I sync my efforts across multiple channels while reaching just the customers I want? How do I know what’s working and what isn’t in my advertising? How can I definitively correlate marketing to actual sales? How can I prove ROI? How can all this data help me tune my customer engagement, so every experience is truly personal and more exceptional?
The truth is the numbers don’t lie, but they can mislead and my view is consumer data is only useful if it directly addresses a consumer need and want. Data is after all just data; most of it makes very little sense and to make matters worse we are drowning in the stuff.
Rich coming from the very member of ‘third party’ who have just only recently moved away from nothing but ‘fallen short of promise’ and ‘failed to connect the online and offline world’.
Please either own up that all our spending with you and all other ‘third party’ had wastage, or stop pandering the ‘data’ and ‘big data’ altogether. Unless you fess up to the shortfall of your own work to move towards the ‘shiny new thing’ nobody will buy it and frankly does the data, digital, online or whatever other terms disservice.