Media data & martech

Data is everywhere. Over the last 20 years advertising has changed beyond recognition as the volume of data collected has exploded. While this has benefitted some, it has caused obfuscation and has led to many questionable and sub-optimal practices. The fact is, data is utterly useless in a vacuum, it is the smart application of data which is important.

The advertising data landscape is becoming increasingly complex and fragmented. Understanding it is a specialism in and of itself. Therefore, we work with specialists to deliver best practice for our media clients.

Our data specialist team ensure the plumbing, collection and use of data is done correctly. Media and marketing campaigns are more effective if we can make sense of the data that we are gathering. The great promise of marketing technology is data-driven automation: the right message to the right person at the right time, at the best possible price.

Sadly, technology is not able to deliver this on its own. Martech is missing two things in order to work:
 
1.    good quality data 
2.    a data-driven culture. 

Our approach to data relies on three core tenets:

Granular tracking of all media activity across paid, owned and earned channels (ad creative, medium, channel, costs) against agreed goals (engagement events, conversion points.)

2) Governance:

Without robust governance, we cannot be sure that the data is accurate and trustworthy. 

3) Training and Support:

Marketers are generally not data specialists. Without proper training and support
we cannot expect them to use data to optimise effectively.

Without all this, we can't expect marketing platforms to automate manual processes and deliver optimised experiences at scale. In other words, we stay in the jungle of old-school hand-cranked marketing and gut-feel decision-making.

Our approach takes marketers on a journey, from Jungle to Utopia. Starting with delivering good quality, granular data and helping marketers to measure performance (the “Village” phase). And then progressing to basic marketing automation (the “Metropolis” phase), so that we can start to close the gap between what our marketing is saying and what each audience segment needs. The Utopia of fully personalised and optimized cross-channel experience is the product of a commitment to transformation and the implementation of a data-culture. All businesses start their journey at a different point and not all reach data utopia…

But even if we don’t reach Utopia, the Metropolis is still a good place to be. You will have a data-driven marketing team efficiently reducing waste and capitalizing on opportunity. The cadence and responsiveness of your marketing will increase. The Return on Ad Spend will improve.

We work alongside our clients to implement best in class data-architecture to deliver cross-channel experiences at speed and scale.