First-party-data. Build it. Classify it. Structure it. Maximise your potential to use it and measure the impacts on your business.
Deploy it in ways that increase your chances of acquiring new customers, retaining existing ones, engendering ‘advocacy ’and ‘brand care at scale’ and, perhaps even more importantly, understanding what your consumers want from you, so that you can rebuild your offerings better, with more margin.
Marketing Nirvana.
The next big thing.
We’ve been here before though, as an industry, haven’t we?
*Also Read: Importance of Mobile Advertising
Marketing nirvana was when we were on the verge of the year of the mobile (in case you were asleep, or too young, that was every year from 1998 until 2004, at which point we gave up waiting – it finally arrived with the iphone in 2007, but we were onto the next ‘next big thing’ by then).
And what was that thing?
I forget, but it may have been Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Second Life, VR, AR, Dynamic Creative Optimisation, Chatbots, Native, in-stream, out-stream, mid roll, pre roll, post roll, bread roll, interstitialsor shutter ads……. you get the idea.
So is ‘Data Driven Marketing’ – bought on by a changing regulatory landscape, a rising tide of public opinion and shifts in the nature of ‘best practice’ – ‘the next big thing’ that’s here to stay, or just the next in a long-line of ‘shiny new things’ that may not necessarily be quite as important as we thought when we realised that everyone else was talking about it, and it was about time we jumped on the bandwagon too?
Well – let’s think of some other ‘fads’ that didn’t quite go the way of the dodo……… the 468*60 banner? Search? Social? Mobile (eventually – although not WAP or Palm Pilots, even after that campaign I ran for The Industry Standard in 2001)? The DSP? DOOH? Podcasts? Programmatic??
The latter is, for me, personally interesting – when I started running paid - for training sessions for Programmatic in 2016, I said I thought it had a 3-year shelf-life until the phrase was effectively no longer necessary and yet, in 2021, I have trained at least 180 people on courses where the remit was ‘we want to better understand programmatic’ – so it’s lasted longer, as a ‘thing that needs explanation’ than we might otherwise have thought when we started to run (internal) training sessions on it at Havas in 2010.
Programmatic, at it’s heart, is simply about serving the right ad, to the right device, at the right time (you can add‘in the right context; with the right message; to the right audience’, if you wish) – and we’re still on that journey.
First-party data – the ability to build it, classify it, use it – to better understand the desires of audiences, and serverelevant ads and, perhaps more importantly, build the services that people are after – will only become more important, and we will only change path should legislation and ‘best practice’ determine that we should.
Personally – I think we will all gain from the move to a first-party world. Consumers, marketers, agencies, practitioners. A world in which consumer consent is at the heart of what we do as an industry, not something we ride roughshod over. I am happy to be part of a business that is helping to define what this means – our ability to understand the movement of anonymised devices, without having any way of associating those devices with people, but with a way to serve an ad to that device which a person will see, based on behaviours. This is a move closer to the marketing nirvana I have personally been espousing for more than 10 years – one in which fewer ads are served, but ads that are more relevant to the person seeing them, without that person being bought/sold without their knowledge, in order to keep services that they might otherwise be happy to pay for, free.
Data-driven marketing, like teenage sex, is something everyone is talking about, few are doing, and fewer still are doing well (and even when they do – nobody really realizes yet) – but it will mature. And those who started earlier, will have the most practice and experience to draw from.
