Data Shock
Daniel Glickman
Sr. Director, Product Marketing @ ActivTrak | Enterprise GTM | Consultant | Coach
It’s 2017: Data Shock Should Not be All That Shocking
We’ve seen it coming: Brands and businesses now have access to infinite amounts of customer data, and the amount of data we are collecting doubles every year. By 2020, who knows what the collection rate will be, and what new marketing insights and powers we will gain—but right now, who cares, because we marketers have enough of our work cut out for us. Most of us are hyperaware of the fact that if we don’t already have a decent strategy in place for the where, how, why and what kind of data we are seeking, collecting, sorting, analyzing, and utilizing, we are standing directly behind the proverbial eight ball.
Of course, the collection, storage, and maintenance of data requires significant investment—and now more than ever, CMOs have to be vociferous: “Dear CEO, CFO, and CIO, Show my marketing team the money!”
I address in my forthcoming book, Disrupt That, the urgent need for marketing departments to request, win, earn, and justify a greater portion of their company or organization’s budget. We must, however, budget for this deluge of data responsibly—with our eyes wide open, because initially, dollar per data unit may be small, but the more we collect, the more we will have to spend. These financials aren’t simply a matter of the number of data units needed today or next quarter, but reflect also the ever-faster servers we’ll need to process our ever-growing data loads and the effort we’ll need to invest in, sorting, structuring and maintaining it all.
Bottom line: The cost to maintain, structure, and purge data is not linear—at a certain threshold, the cost per data unit will actually increase.