Data marketing confidence on the wane, ADMA chief warns
Sangster
The head of Australia’s biggest data marketing association has admitted advertisers’ confidence in using data is “not particularly high” as the amount made available to them expands rapidly.
Jodie Sangster, chief executive of the Association of Data Driven Marketing and Advertising (ADMA), said marketers believed they had cracked the data world in 2012. But three years on, their confidence has drained.
She told ADMA’s Data Day conference in Sydney this morning the collection of data has become increasingly complex.
“We are feeling less confident about data than we were three years ago and part of the reason is that it’s become more complex,” she said. “We thought we were getting our arms around what truly is digital and data driven but in the last three years we have realised that what we thought we had our arms around has now expanded into even different areas.
“Our confidence is not particularly high.”
On the positive side, companies are increasingly investing in data driven strategies that permeates through the company and is not just confined to marketing teams, Sangster added.
She told delegates that a successful data driven strategy is not down to marketing and technology alone. There must be support at board level and a skill set to match.
“There needs to be buy in from the top,” she said. “Without that buy in it can be difficult to change a business to put data at the centre of what we do.”
Sangster said many companies are investing heavily in technology, but warned that sophisticated systems alone would not bring success. There needs to be a strategy and the talent to make it work.
“There needs to be teams that have the skill set so that technology can start to deliver on its capabilities,” she said. “Without that talent, technology can’t do what it’s there to do.”
The major challenge for everyone is finding thar talent, she added
“We have to train and train and invest in our people so they have the broad skill set that is going to be required for a future marketer.”
Sangster said ADMA has commissioned research, to be carried out by Engage Digital, that will produce what she claimed will be the first “true study” into data driven automation and the barriers hindering its development.
The paper will be released at the ADMA Forum in August.
Steve Jones
Not enough case-studies where the methodologies are generalisable and replicable for other industry categories. Why?
a) Do you seriously expect a business to give away such a crucial competitive advantage so relatively early in the data game, if it does exist?
b) As Jodie says, what’s needed is a skill-set to match. Certainly not pure number-crunching types, but a hybridised marketing type who knows how to seek insight from the numbers and also knows how to leverage it. Forget ‘creativity’, this will be the new desirable ‘black art’.
Meanwhile, for the businesses that don’t have a) or b), their pile of data expands exponentially every millisecond with no way of knowing how to use it. And a paralysis has set in…
User ID not verified.
@me. As I read on another post today “The ratio of relevant data to irrelevant data will asymptotically approach zero.”
User ID not verified.
Such interesting times. On one hand a significant lack of confidence in understanding data and the opportunities is highlighted by someone close to the action, on another a prominent marketer says we have too many ‘math men’ and not enough ‘mad men’. (https://mumbrella.com.au/qantas-marketing-boss-marketers-too-focused-on-math-also-need-great-ideas-280733).
User ID not verified.