GM Formally ‘Ramps Up’ Data Monetization Efforts

At a major digital marketing conference this week dominated by on-line marketers, content providers, DMPs, DSPs, identity-graphs, and CPM rates, General Motors was clearly the ‘new player’ on the scene this week at Acxiom’s RampUp 2018 conference in San Francisco, CA USA.  And the message GM brought to the conference was loud and clear: we’re ‘open for business’ and ready to make sensible commercial agreements to license their connected vehicle and enterprise data.   

Charles Thomas, GM’s recently appointed Chief Data & Analytics Officer (CDAO), and his data analytics and monetization team messaged an aggressive strategy directly endorsed by GM CEO Mary Barra to unlock 20+ years of connected vehicle data leveraging a, “rolling Internet of Things.” To be more specific, GM signaled a potentially lucrative value proposition to the broader digital marketing ecosystem across multiple conference presentations and briefing to SBD Automotive: data from more than 8.6 million 4G LTE connected vehicles with over 10 billion anonymized automotive data collected each day. Potential use cases include deriving driving behavior and even probabilistic consumer consumption verification.

GM is not alone, of course, among leading automakers and industry suppliers in seeking to leverage connected vehicle data for a range of internal benefits and seeking financial revenue streams from 3rd parties. While not seeking monetary gain, BMW has successfully launched its CarData platform in Europe (and planning its US launch in 2018) to enable consumers to share data with 3rd parties on an opt-in basis to enable new service experiences; Hyundai showed a proof of concept (Blue Link "All Access") at AutoMobility LA to partner with 3rd party service providers; and a host of additional automotive OEMs are in the advanced planning stages of exposing vehicle data outside the enterprise. A wide range and growing list of vehicle data aggregators are also signing up automakers to better enable data monetization via anonymized vehicle data streams and eventually transactional data exchanges across multiple OEMs.

Based on GM’s presentations here in San Francisco, a few takeaways for the broader industry to consider:    

Organizational Focus

GM has created a distinct data organization with global responsibility reporting to the President of GM North America. Thomas, a data guru formerly with USAA, Wells Fargo, and HP has been given a mandate to hire data scientists, product managers, and business development teams. While this has been announced and practiced at other automotive competitors (with varying degrees of success), his team will have autonomy to work across and in partnership with multiple functional areas including GM’s IT teams, internal marketing organizations, and GM’s GCCX (OnStar) to maximize the enterprise data opportunity. Step one is assessing GM’s “first party” data and evaluating what they have on hand (and those data elements which have potential corporate/outside value), and second, breaking up the data into distinct data domains for emerging use cases.

Not Internal OR External Value (But Both)

At this stage, almost everything responsible is seemingly on the table. Thomas talked about dividing his emerging organization up into two parts: a product team focused on materially impacting corporate efficiencies internally within GM, and a second team focused on licensing data to trusted partners outside the company.

Within GM, Thomas’s organization will focus on internal use cases leveraging enterprise data including connected vehicle and V.I.N. data which can materially impact GM’s $150 billion annual revenue and cost reductions such as: supply chain and logistics optimization, analyzing trim levels purchased by customers to predict future purchase intent, improving build quality on vehicles, enhancing HR staff retention, and better end-to-end CRM with its dealers. In addition, the data coming from vehicles will be further enhanced/analyzed for GM’s growing EV and autonomous vehicle development portfolio.

Externally, the three domains GM will initially focus upon are: media, banking & insurance, and retail. The use cases cited include enabling better location-based commerce awareness, media consumption (music stations and which advertisements are/not consumed), identifying elements for safer driving behavior, usage based insurance, correlating driving patterns on financial payment habits, increasing retail store visits, assessing how low inflated tires impact fuel consumption, and identifying who is driving the vehicle for better ad targeting. Many of these new deals will further enhance GM’s foothold into the market initially established via the recent launch last year of GM Marketplace and associated partnerships. And eventually, thoughtfully considering how new vehicle sensor technologies and enablers such as biometrics could impact health awareness and health care management in the future.

Partners Required

Thomas is taking a “consultative sales” approach with both an over the top strategy, as well as enabling strategic proof of concepts with curated hand-selected partners (and is open to new ideas and inquiries). Many of the partnerships will focus on what value GM and its partners can provide end consumers as well as one another. In addition, Thomas indicated that GM’s new team will focus on ‘90-day wins’, not 2-3 year cycles too often plaguing the automotive sector overall. Thomas also realizes that although GM has scale and early mover advantage, the ability to differentiate needs to be aggressively communicated, and advises his team to, “always be selling.”

Trust Matters

GM is putting “substantial” data governance rules in place. Thomas and his team realize the trust consumers place in GM and OnStar is paramount. Thomas indicated that GM is working to further strengthen its terms and conditions with its customers, and cited that GM research has shown millennials are increasingly willing to share data if GM can provide fair value in exchange (discounts, convenience, better management of their owned asset, etc.).

A Look Ahead

GM’s plans in this space are ambitious, and the automotive race to enable new data-centric business models is on.  

While GM is confident of its position and now open for data business, data buyers may desire/prefer further connected vehicle data standardization (e.g. ISO 20078) across automotive brands and vehicle lines to gain scale and ensure cost effectiveness before fully committing resources to what amounts to a new single platform. GM must not only execute its plans for an aggressive vehicle portfolio and ramping mobility business, but also show differentiated data value, as well as build a customer- and partner-centric data organization and infrastructure from the ground up to satisfy the needs of increasingly savvy data-driven B2B customers have come to expect.  

With marketers and financial institutions at RampUp 2018 all chasing the holy grail of digital identity, personal marketing, and customer data platforms, the vehicle (and the roughly 2-hours vehicle owners spend driving each day) was an indeed a disruptor, and may fill an important void in the 360-degree view of the customer.