Marketers Need a Cross-Eyed Vision of their Data Future, or Risk Being Blind Sided #DigitalSense

Two fundamentally different visions of the future of marketing are starting to emerge, and this schism under the surface of our industry conversation is becoming too big to be overlooked.

On the one hand the data-fuelled marketing train continues to chug squarely into the distance, heading for a destination of advanced 1:1 marketing, detailed consumer profiles and algorithmically driven creativity. Personal Connections at Scale is the name of the game and even mass market brands can build unique consumer relationships. Setting off in a very different direction are the quieter voices warning that the future of marketing might in fact be one with far less data, where consumer privacy shatters many established adtech systems, and where the value of all this personalisation is perhaps not what it first seems anyway. The answer, as usual, probably lies somewhere in the middle of the two, but to end up at that station marketers need to be keeping an eye on both trains. 

Laboured analogies aside, there’s a serious point here. It’s easy to find big debate and presentations about the power of data in marketing, and many companies have staked their future vision on some notion of personalisation, but serious discussion of the alternative is largely regulated to lawyers & data privacy forums. In those halls ‘GDPR’ is not a Millennium Bug style non-event but a looming seismic shift we’ve only felt the warning signs of so far. Recommendations coming out of some EU countries ahead of the next phase of ePrivacy Regulation go as far as to suggest that all forms of tracking, including basic analytics or fraud prevention, need to wait for active consumer opt in. Amongst many data privacy experts the ‘real time bidding’ programmatic model digital advertising is built on today is seen as a house of cards, which will fall and need to be rebuilt when regulators eventually get round to bringing their cases against it. 

Regardless of local regulatory changes it’s hard to deny there are shifting consumer opinions that advertisers would do well to understand. Following Cambridge Analytica a number of ‘common place’ adtech data techniques have found themselves splashed on front pages as scandalous invasions of privacy, and certainly few consumers truly realised how far their data is being used before. Yet it’s easy to over exaggerate this effect too - whilst many newspapers have axes to grind against the big tech platforms we haven’t seen widespread consumer action as a result of any of these changes. It is however hard to imagine a world in 10/20 years’ time where one way or another consumers haven’t taken over far more control of their personal data and how it’s used.

If that’s an opt-in future the industry has a lot of work to do. There are many articles showing the ‘dark’ side of data usage, but it’s hard to see who will tell the good side. Accepting ad tracking might genuinely make your web experience better (more relevant, fewer ads, lower frequencies, whilst also heling tackle ad fraud and other issues) but that means someone will have to convince people of these benefits. If we want consumers to share their data we’ll have to find ways to make it a decent value exchange for them. 

"You need to make sure you are using data to be relevant to more people, not visible to fewer"

And then there’s the question of whether the relentless data chase is worth it in the first place. My simple guidance on this is that you need to make sure you are using data to be relevant to more people, not visible to fewer. All too often marketers’ approaches involve layering on countless data sets until the audience they are looking for is so specific they can hardly find them - with the best data in the world there are still many long tail consumers who will end up buying your products and growing your brands without ever giving off any signals that they might be about to, cutting them out of your reach is a very risky path to go down. The ‘wastage’ of untargeted audiences also seeing your traditional media campaigns is one of the reasons channels like TV are so great at fame and brand building. 

Data has a safer role to play in the ‘personalisation at scale’ space, ensuring you are reaching that broader audience but trying to tailor messages within it which are most likely to grab people’s attention, move them down the funnel and help them convert. Even here the industry has jumped to advanced data solutions being the answer when good old fashioned context (known well to traditional print media planners) often brings the same or greater effects far more easily and is certainly far from being maximised to date. 

You might happen to know that someone is a massive sports fan based on their data, but if they’re currently looking up the weather they might not be in the mindset to pay attention to anything sports related, or realise at all that an advert had been customised to better suit them. Yet if they’re specifically looking at sports pages as your advert reaches them, then you can be pretty sure that they will be contextually thinking about sport and an appropriately themed ad will hit home. In these cases you can throw your data sets out, the fact that people are there at that moment is enough to identify them whoever they are. It’s clearly nothing new (see the past 50+ years of print media) but it’s been notable that big tech players like Google have started to talk up this approach as the future in their own channels now.

Increased personal relevance makes huge intrinsic sense whenever it’s talked about, and it’s relatively easy to drive media efficiencies (effectively cheaper clicks) by following this sort of approach. It’s somewhat harder to show how much the approach truly makes your marketing more effective, especially by the time you start balancing the costs of data, effort & additional creative versus the improvement. Often a challenge with dynamic and personalised creative is that it’s more basic and less polished than single executions, often reverting to almost stock imagery to provide different options, reducing its value for brand advertisers at least. A single, powerful, well-executed creative idea certainly has the potential to work harder than a poorly executed but personalised piece. It feels almost blasphemous to say it, but I’ve seen more external pieces of research suggesting personalisation isn’t worth it than ones which suggest it is. I suspect a lot of that is that marketers aren’t doing it to the best of their abilities yet and progress will come. 

Which isn’t to say you can let the data-driven train drive off into the future without you. Many of the challenges to these exact issues can be found onboard it, for instance if you are able to find positive ways to build your own first party data sets. There will also certainly be great global variations in public opinion and regulation around these topics for many years to come - companies which span all extremes will have to decide whether to adopt a higher universal standard or keep pushing the boundaries of what is accepted locally.

I’ve seen some fantastic examples of the power of data in action, to drive our audience reach, relevance and creativity. Data can be applied not just to digital channels but traditional ones too, and can help tackle fundamental business challenges like competing against a higher spending rival, or identify new growth opportunities. I haven’t spent much time on the ‘more data’ side of the argument today because it’s so widely discussed elsewhere and doesn’t need me adding to it. Hopefully your take out from this piece is that there are two sides to every story, and marketers would do well to keep an eye on them both... even if that leaves you looking a bit cross eyed.