‘It’s easy to get paralysed’: Why Australian media and marketing pros are being overwhelmed by data
Australians are the most likely to think that the volume of data is overcomplicating their professional decision-making compared to other global cohorts, according to an Oracle report. Managing director of Foxcatcher, David Gaskill, said the result somewhat makes sense.
The new study, named ‘The Decision Dilemma’, surveyed more than 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries, including 1,000 Australians. Compared to the 86% global benchmark, 93% of Australians said too much data introduced complexity into their professional decisions.
David Gaskill
In terms of how much this finding rings true in the marketing industry specifically, Gaskill said he could see why Australia is over-indexed, potentially due to the level of maturity in tools and the time it takes for businesses to get comfortable with the data output.
“As the report rightly points out, the data is moving so quickly that it’s easy to get paralysed. And when we don’t get paralysed, quite often we focus on the immediate decision that needs to be made or what the data is telling us,” he told Mumbrella.
“We need to ensure that there’s always that alignment with an organisational goal and a strategic vision.”
Foxcatcher, the agency that Gaskill oversees, is a data-driven marketing technology division in the RyanCap group.
In the process of building up to a more comprehensive structure, Gaskill said organisations should strive to have a large set of data to work with.
“I think organisations are doing the right thing by over-sourcing and collecting as much data as possible,” he said. “The decisions being made in comfort around those will increase over time as they start to understand what is really important to the organisation and the decisions.”
The reality of most businesses working on limited resources was not lost on Gaskill. For internal data, he said the collation process would get easier over time as principles and frameworks become more established.
However, he said businesses should have a more focused vision when it comes to sourcing external data, because the traditionally free or low-cost datasets now come with a price due to the emergence of new tools.
“The value of those datasets has been perceived to be low on account of the volume of the data, and the complexity and difficulty to derive value,” he said.
“With the advances in AI, for example, we can now democratise the output of that data and analyse and draw conclusions from it.
As soon as the value which wasn’t previously there can be extracted from data, he said, a cost will be passed onto organisations. One prime example is Twitter’s recent decision to end free access to its social data.
“I do think that’s a risk to organisations going forward, however, their own data should have increasing value to them and be of greater focus,” said Gaskill.
Jen Snell
Further findings in the report indicate that almost all respondents (99%) want help from data. In an ideal world, they want data to help them make better decisions, reduce risk or make faster decisions. However, 41% of Australians don’t know which data or sources to trust and 82% have given up on making a decision because the data was overwhelming – the highest globally.
Jen Snell, Finder’s head of growth Australia and head of digital marketing, foundations, said the data available to marketers has almost gotten more and less at the same time. An example of it is the added difficulty of digital attribution after cookie deprecation.
“I personally don’t necessarily think it’s becoming more complicated. I think it’s just that it can be overwhelming if you don’t have a strategy,” she said. “It’s probably about keeping in mind what’s your business objective and what you are trying to achieve.”
Finder collects first-party datasets including conversion tracking and lead scoring, alongside information from its survey called consumer sentiment tracker, but doesn’t work with any third-party data suppliers.
However, Snell said she’s personally against collecting data points for the sake of it, as it flags not only a lack of strategy but also concerns around privacy.
“There’s a piece theoretically around just not storing data if you don’t need it, but also there’s a piece of having clarity. If you’re just collecting and using what you need, I think probably forces you to be more strategic as well.”
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Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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