(So, You’ll Need a Much Better Gun).
Right now, in every media organization around the globe, someone is making a valiant effort to find that elusive “magic bullet” – that singular, data-driven solution that will deliver the most effective advertising ever, regardless of the target. And that’s a crime. Because that magic bullet doesn’t exist. These media sharp shooters are not only missing the target but wasting their time and their clients’ money. Data, as marketing ammunition, has little power. Power comes from the platform into which that data is loaded.
If “bazillion” was a real number, I’d use it as an estimate of how many data points are now swirling about the heads (and contributing to the angst) of every media analyst on earth. We’ve been conditioned to believe that basic analytics like Google tags and pixels are reliable sources of data. And, to a certain extent, they are. But they don’t give us the caliber of behavioral insights necessary to turn big data into intelligent data and knowledge into power.
In today’s digital world, data is the new “natural resource.” It’s plentiful, accessible, portable, and from it, we can mine consumption habits and other behaviors that guide us to our targets. However, all this data is literally everywhere all at once and disparate as it runs across all channels.
How then do we pull this data together, match it one-to-one and organize it in a way that not only creates the right marketing mix but identifies and justifies channel attribution of incremental spend?
Just as with the human brain, dumping a high volume of information into the space available is no guarantee of success. Each individual’s ability to process, organize, analyze and apply all that data is the true measure of intelligence. So, if we aspire to be good stewards of our clients’ marketing investments, we must ensure our data resources are being managed by the most intelligent platforms available.
Digital convergence is rapidly pushing all advertising – both consumer and commercial – toward internet protocol. Advances in technology and a post-GDPR landscape mean advertisers must leverage the ability to create their own hyper-customized audiences, and to do so in a much faster, far more efficient way.
The most sophisticated systems (like Modern Impact’s Intelligent Pixel® platform) take in all this data, organize it, learn from it, and give us the precise, intelligent data we need to target, reach and influence perfect audiences. When we create campaign content, retargeting is included as part of dynamic audience segmentation and revised in real-time based on user behavior. Since everything is moving at the speed of digital, it also takes a team of experts to manage the process for optimal ROI. A platform this powerful in the hands of an amateur is a surefire strategy for disaster.
As we move to centralizing and matching data, we must understand how to translate disparate bytes into intelligent data on a platform that will make it more powerful than we ever imagined possible. Engineering and implementing intelligent data is as close to a magic bullet as we can get.
