Data Day Spoiler Alert

Data is big in marketing. Every day brings another headline of how it is transforming business and how budgets need to be spent on it. The Big Data buzz has such a wide impact that we may struggle to decide where to focus our attention.

As ever more sophisticated data related technology and processes are unveiled so too are marketers’ ambitions. Moves by the big players underline the trend – acquisitions by AOL and Google (of Converto and Adometry respectively) have underlined the importance of marketing attribution; these add to the developments by Facebook and eBay Enterprise in this area alone. These are probably good decisions as attribution is one of the two most frequently used applications of data modelling (Source – eConsultancy 2014.)

However, the race to realise actual business advantage is often frustrating. For all our talk of transformative progress,

• more than 60% of worldwide marketers feel that fragmented data collection is restricting the type of personalisation that they can achieve (Source - Signa, 2015),
• less than half of mobile marketers are measuring app usage, time or conversion (focus remains largely on the far more bland metric of download volumes; Source – Adobe 2015)
• only one in five marketers are using any type of analytics on their mobile programmes (source – Response Tap and eConsultancy 2015.)

This illustrates the fact that our ambitions are often reined in by reality. We are awash with data but all too often don’t yet see value from it. Data is messy and difficult. It always has been.

But there’s another thing that might yet rein us in rather more than anything else; that might render these frustrations and obstacles as mere irritants.

In Europe, we are on the verge of major changes in data protection legislation. The potential implications are every bit as transformative as the Big Data story – but in a far less positive light. It is likely that over the next two to three years we will find ourselves in an environment –

• Governed by laws not directives
• Where consent has to be explicitly opt in
• Where ‘personal’ data may be as much defined by online identities as by name and addresses
• With very serious sanctions (possibly up to 5% of annual worldwide turnover of 100m Euros) for transgressions

The implications of these changes could, at a stroke, decimate many of the databases on which all of our big data ambitions rely.

It surely makes sense therefore to focus on some of the more apparently mundane aspects of how we collect and record permissions, what we collect and how we process the data. This isn’t new and is certainly not part of the shiny Big Data story. For many of us it’s a well-trodden path over the last 15 years but a very different one now.  

This isn’t making enough marketing headlines but it’s a subject that will make a huge impact on the future of our businesses. It’s important to every client with which I work and I’d bet everyone reading this.  Some focus on the coalface here – even if it’s away from the bright fashionably intellectual lights - will be time well spent.