You are devaluing your brand and jeopardizing your future if you are doing this.

Anyone see the new about one of the more well known lead/data companies? Known for helping marketers augment / append / update data in their CRM for their campaigns? Happy Holidays and Q4!

There is a growing trend in the data industry to race to the bottom on pricing in order to hopefully run the competition out of business making consumer and B2B data highly commoditized. I get it, marketers want the data to update their CRM and add scale so their Q4 campaigns can show positive growth in the all important final quarter and holiday season.......who wouldn't.

But in the race to get cheap data they can use over and over again are they devaluing their own product and reputation with data that at best is not deterministic and would certainly not impress consumers with their ability to customize adds based on their current "in market" status? Never mind $6 leads for those in demand gen being all the rage (really now, Walmart pricing for leads for your salespeople.....did you do self checkout too?). The cheaper data becomes the more data scientists should be skeptical about things like accuracy, compliance, and the ability to really point them to consumers or customers actually even in market for their product or services.

The Chart above is important from a basic marketing level. But there may be something else you didn't think about when buying those $6 leads or paying "wholesale" pricing for your data. Compliance laws are only going to get stricter and come at a more regular pace making data harder and harder to get. So augmenting your data and not having to License it but just pay a per contact "membership" price may become a thing of the past. Data will be available only as long as you are willing to license it. So you'd better keep track of what records you are updating with what data. Compliance will make this necessary as it becomes hard and harder to get updated compliant and accurate data on consumer.

Also keep in mind the average shelf life of a consumer profile is about three years max. Other componenets like MAIDS and HEMs etc vary. But the overall PII and data within the profile is about three years. My prediction here is that compliance laws will get to a point where they become almost prohibitively strict within the next year to two (assuming this will be when cookies really do disappear, IP's become blocked and all hell breaks loose). At this point the clock begins ticking. Those that beat the rush and got their house in order will have their CRM updated and will be watching it degrade over time. The hope is somewhere in the two to three years following D-day they will begin to see the negative affect this has on commerce and begin to back off some of the super strict compliance laws that may not make sense (don't even get me started on the email debate). Those that did not get their house in order or did it on the cheap ($6 leads, wholesale pricing) will be facing an even worse challenge. A database that is essentially losing their company money because they have no way to reach their client base without paying the price the data is worth moving forward.

While it may seem like its not an apples to apples comparison it comes down to one question.......what is your product worth to the market and how much are you willing to budget to be able to reach the right clients at the right time and place? the less you pay the less you are saying your product is worth or you are willing to pay for growth. Yes it is true there is a line where spending more does not mean you will gain that back in ROI....that formula is for you to figure out as "mileage may vary" as they say.

We are weeks away from Black Friday and the clock is ticking. Getting your house in order may mean the difference between being on the CEO's naughty or nice list.

I wish you all a Happy Holidays and am happy to read the comments and suggestions and feedback you leave on this. Being able to come together and collaborate helps everyone win.

feel free to reach out to me at Machintel if I can be of any help with the topic above.