what`s better than big data?

WHAT’S
BETTER
THAN
BIG DATA?
(answer: smart data)
Here’s how to make sure you’re
doing data right
CONTENTS
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
Page
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
Intro
Five Ways to Get Big Data Moving Faster
Are You Data Greedy
How to Rock that Data That You Have
The Marketers’ Big Data Playbook
Is Your Database a Pigsty?
Gartner: One Third of Leading Enterprises Face a Data Crisis
Turning Big Data Into Smart Data
Six Big Data Dos and Don’ts
Big Data Is Not Enough
Are Marketers in Danger of Data Prohibition?
The Creep Line
Tweets
No matter what data you’re collecting—be it data big or small—the single
watchword should always be “smart.” As the many experts in these pages
point out, if you’re collecting data and not making actionable, it’s time to
take some serious stock…because data is not kidding around, and neither
should you. According to the Direct Marketing Association, data-driven marketing is a $156 billion economy—and growing. There may be pitfalls, but
there’s also great opportunity out there. So read on, strategize, and prosper.
Five Ways to Get Big
Data Moving Faster
Experiments, campaigns, and other strategies to get past the
overwhelming size of Big Data. By Natasha D. Smith
Where’s the Party?
According to IBM, companies are focusing on analyzing internal—rather than
external—data:
88%
73%
57%
43%
38%
34%
Transactions (first-party)
Web data (first-party)
Emails (first-party)
Social media (third-party)
Audio (third-party)
Photos & videos (third-party)
How can marketers get past the size and velocity of data and extract insight that’s actionable?
“It’s crucial for marketers to optimize those
insights,” says Allen Bonde, VP of product marketing and innovation at analytics firm Actuate
Corporation. “Data needs to be accessible,
understandable, and actionable.”
Bonde and fellow Big Data wrangler Wilson
Raj, global director of customer intelligence at
SAS, provide marketers with five tips for making that happen.
1. Let the type of campaign define what useful
data is. Rather than letting the data lead your
campaign, allow the campaign determine which
data is important, says Bonde. “Starting with
the campaign first will narrow the data search
for marketers.” An email campaign, will lead to
a different data set than social media, direct
mail or display ads on the web.
sales. “For example, many businesses have chat
records when consumers are looking for help
from customer service,” says Raj. “That data’s
been collected but often isn’t used. Use existing
data as much as possible.”
4. Remember to experiment with your data.
Try different tests and experiments that may
provide you with more insight about your audience, says Bonde. He notes that too few marketers are willing to try experiments—from A/B
testing to social campaigns. Experimenting is
a great strategy to get better results from your
campaigns.
5. Link data and insights to company product
and services. Raj says marketers should focus
on the customer’s behavior—past purchases, browsing habits that show a potential to
buy—and then link products to those consumers. “Home in on the people who are actually
2. Identify your marketing objective. Know
buying versus the entire set of data,” he adviswhat you want to achieve before you dive
es. Doing this and comparing info from other
into a pool of Big Data. “Start with an objecchannels will help marketers enrich their custive in mind. Setting your objective is a great tomer profiles and determine what’s motivating
way to get past the size and velocity of data,” a consumer.
Raj says.
3. Use the data that’s already there. Vast
amounts of data remain untapped. That’s information that could help craft campaigns, meet
the needs of customers, and convert leads into
Are You Data Greedy?
Marketers’ constant hunt for insight can turn them into to data hoarders. Here are seven types of data
that marketers stockpile but don’t really need. By Elyse Dupré
tradition, the data isn’t very telling, notes Tom
Sather, senior director of email research for
email intelligence solution provider Return Path.
“The click is great for counting conversions, but
does little to build a brand or tell us why they
are clicking,” he says.
AUDIENCE NUMBERS:
The constant counting of page views, Facebook
likes, and email subscribers can make marketing
seem like a giant popularity contest. However,
Sather says that—like clicks—this information
isn’t insightful on its own. Instead, he suggests
looking at competitive data, such as a company’s subscriber list, engagement, and purchasHere are seven types of data that marketers
es relative to its competitors. “By comparing
prone to data hoarding and data greed will ask
email audience data, marketers can get a much
for but don’t really need.
clearer picture [of] where they stand and where
they’re moving,” Sather says. “Clicks and audiSURVEYS:
Site and brand surveys can be an annoyance for ence size are great to measure, but unfortunately, it’s all relative.”
marketers and customers. Besides being too
long, many surveys contain open fields, says
SITE TRAFFIC:
Martin Kihn, research director for research firm
Marketers track site traffic because it’s compreGartner’s marketing leader practice. Analyzing
hensible and easy to collect, Kihn says. But once
these fields, he says, can be time consuming
marketers collect this data, they can’t act on it,
and require sophisticated text analytics techhe argues. A marketer may see that his companology. But for companies that can’t shake the
ny’s site traffic is down, but the data doesn’t tell
survey addiction, Kihn advises asking a maximum of three questions that only derive quanti- him why it’s down. Instead of looking at data at
the aggregate level, Kihn advises marketers to
tative responses.
whittle their insight down to the individual, or at
least segmented, level.
CLICKS:
Whether online or through email marketers
LOCATION:
are obsessed with clicks. And while tracking
Marketers shouldn’t ask questions they know
this easy-to-collect metric is a time-honored
the answer to. Soliciting consumers’ ZIP Codes
when marketers already have access to them
via IP addresses can make website experiences
more irksome than they need to be, says Scott
Arenstein, partner and account director for creative digital agency Hello Design. To further cut
back on extra steps, marketers can auto-populate information asked for via online forms via
social registrations.
BIRTHDAYS:
Unless you’re really going to use them, Arenstein says asking for birthdates sets the expectation that marketers will use this information to
send consumers timely gifts or coupons. “This
is something marketers should stay away from
unless they plan to follow through,” he says.
PHONE NUMBERS:
Many consumers aren’t willing to provide their
phone number because it makes them feel as
if they no longer control the buying process,
says Scott Bryden, management supervisor for
marketing agency Gage. Instead of pining for
customers’ numbers, Bryden suggests asking
for email addresses. Email facilitates a twoway conversation, he says, while still putting
customers in the driver’s seat. It also provides
a more effective means of qualifying leads
before a call. “Make [giving a phone number]
optional,” Bryden says. “That way you’ll only
get numbers from people who truly consider
themselves prospects.”
How to Rock the Data That You Have
Four data experts break down the do’s and don’ts of how marketers can make the most of the data that’s
served to them directly. By Elyse Dupré
have a data steward who’s responsible for keeping
the data clean, concise, and up to date.
Measure revenue and engagement. While profit is the ultimate goal, engagement metrics can
be a proxy for long-term success by determining
whether consumers like a service and want to
continue to use it, says Elena Zheleva, lead data
scientist at LivingSocial.
not just reporting facts but that you’re constructing a narrative that’s going to suggest action on
the other end,” he says.
Expect the data to interpret itself. “Data itself is
inert, [and] it doesn’t say anything,” IBM’s Kobielus
says. “You’re trying to tell a fact-based tale. That
often starts with conditionals [or] hypotheticals.”
In addition to being a great storyteller, two of the
most powerful characteristics that analysts can
have are good intuition and a strong sense of curiosity, Henderson says.
Engage your data scientists. “Instead of giving
[data scientists] tasks, involve them in the process,” Zheleva says. “Then work collaboratively on
It’s pretty safe to assume that the Rolling Stones
solutions. Marketers and data scientists come from Improperly set up your A/B tests. When conweren’t singing about data when the rock band
ducting A/B tests, it’s important to compare data
different perspectives—both can bring something
wrote “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” But to the table.”
samples from the same populations and time
the smash hit’s message rings true for Mick and
periods, says LivingSocial’s Zheleva. For example,
marketing fans alike. When asking customers for
when determining a new message’s effectiveness,
Share your failures. No one wants to admit that
data, you can’t always get what you want. But if
marketers shouldn’t compare responses from entheir data analysis wasn’t as telling as they’d
you try sometimes, well, you might find you get
gaged and unengaged consumers. Likewise, when
hoped. But Claudia Perlich says sharing failures
what you need.
launching a new product, marketers shouldn’t
is crucial to learning. Perlich, chief scientist for
compare yesterday’s metrics to today’s, Zheleva
marketing technology company Dstillery, also
DO
says. Sunday’s metrics may be lower than Monencourages marketers to collaborate with other
Ensure that your data is accurate. When building
day’s metrics, she notes. Fixate on social sentidepartments, such as IT, to develop their skill sets
a comprehensible database, marketers should
ment. When analyzed alone, social sentiment fails
and help others understand the problem that the
compile all of their customer data into a single
to tell the entire story of how an audience truly
marketing team is trying to solve.
warehouse, says James Kobielus, senior program
feels, Kobielus says. “[Social sentiment] isn’t really
director of product marketing for Big Data analyt- DON’T
the voice of the people,” he says. “It’s the voice of
ics at IBM. He notes that before they consolidate
Collect data without a purpose. “You shouldn’t
a very skewed subset of your market.”
their data, marketers need to match, merge, and
be capturing and collecting data without some
Many consumers self-censor their posts, he
cleanse their data, such as through identity resolu- sense of what you’re going to do with it,” says
notes, while others only use social media for certion. Identity resolution helps marketers determine Jay Henderson, strategy director for IBM Smarter
tain purposes—like work—and don’t reveal their
whether a set of data points pertains to a single
Commerce. Henderson advises marketers to outgenuine thoughts. So, Kobielus says, marketers
person, he explains. Not only do marketers need
line their objectives before collecting data and to
should supplement social sentiment with other
the right tools to make this happen, but they also
focus on solving a problem or achieving a business forms of customer feedback, including surveys
need the right help. Kobielus advises businesses to goal. “That often can help make sure that you’re
and focus groups.
The Marketers’ Big Data Playbook
Marketing pundits share their top four game plans for Big Data. By Natasha D. Smith
be flexible and use [the data] that’s available to
them. It really gets down to simplification of the
data points.”
Williams says there are indicators within the
data that can lead marketers to the information
they should be extracting from it: “There are so
many trends and signals within the data,” he
notes. “Focusing on what those trends and signals
are and how customers are interacting will enable
[marketers] to simplify all of that information.”
Connect the data
As the name suggests, Big Data is voluminous.
“The volume of information that we produce as
a society is doubling every 12 to 18 months,” says
Justin Schuster, VP of marketing at data onboarding company LiveRamp. Schuster explains
that with the explosion of digital devices customWithout question, data analytics is getting more ers use that creates data and the emerging techcomplex, but marketers don’t have to sit on the
nology marketers use to collect data, all of that
sidelines; they can go on the offense with a game information must be linked. “Marketers must conplan that helps them leverage and take action on nect [customer] data to fuel search optimization,
Big Data.
and determine how websites are personalized;
Bruce Williams, director, media practice lead
[marketers should] even connect transaction
for digital marketing agency 360i and several
data to ad impression information and exposure
other data experts provide a play-by-play of four data so they can do an attribution analysis.”
effective Big Data strategies for marketers.
Schuster says marketers can go for the double
play by taking offline data (e.g., in-store purchasSimplify the data
es) and connecting it to online data (e.g., digital
To play ball, marketers must organize and simpli- ad views) to improve targeting. “By connecting
fy the data they have. Williams says that means
the purchase information they have, marketers
paring down complex data into simple, personal
can determine the best way to target a particular
insights that marketers can take action on.
audience.” Schuster adds that by connecting the
“Brand marketers don’t have to stitch together
dots, marketers can also suppress customers and
every last piece of data that exists just to make
prospects they don’t want to reach: “The mesit actionable,” he explains. “They just have to
sages you do send [will have] a higher yield.”
Quality check the data
The ongoing collection of data should also mean
consistent quality checks. “Quality data is data
that is accurate, correct, and portrays the consumer as a person versus a mass segment,” says
Lisa Arthur, CMO of marketing applications at
Teradata, a provider of analytic data platforms.
“If I have data but I can’t do anything with it, it’s
not helping me engage my customer more effectively.” Arthur says data of low quality doesn’t
provide insight, thus will produce less effective or
simply ineffective campaigns: “If I’ve got access
to data but it’s bad [information], the outcome
will be the same [as not having any data].”
Don’t overestimate Big Data
Marketers shouldn’t risk striking out by concentrating on only Big Data; rather, they should
focus on small and open data—or actionable,
free insights. “Big Data is important, but it’s not
everything,” says Marina MacDonald, CMO of Red
Roof Inn. MacDonald cites how the hotel chain
used flight cancellation information and weather
forecasts to make relevant offers to stranded airport passengers this past winter. “Marketers have
to determine when the marketing [campaign]
resonates with the right people,” she says. “To do
that, you have to use the right data—not necessarily Big Data—to give the message to the right
person, in the right place.”
IS YOUR
DATABASE A
PIGSTY?
Companies
Compa
C
anies that
th
increasplan on
p
n incre
their
ing thei
in
ir use
of data-driven
o
data--driven
marketing
market
m
ting over
ov
tthe coming
com
ming year*
ye
Files
F
ille
ile
ess classified
cla
asssiifi
as
fie
fied
ed
d
as
as fu
ffunctional
un
nctio
ona
nall or
o
higher
h
hi
ig
gh
he
err in
n
terms
rm
ms of
of email
e
deliverability
84%
90%
Files that had less than
10% duplicate records
Some marketers’
data hygiene
practices have
gone a little
“sow”er
2X
Increase iin
n the llikeliikelihood of satisfaction with
the accuracy of contact-level and company-level data-bases
among users of dataenrichment services
versus nonusers*
Last
name
Percent of marketing databases that are barely functional
Percent of marketing
records containing:
78% First name
77% Last name
63% Title
SOURCE: NetProspex *Aberdeen Group
Percent of marketing records missing:
82% Company revenue
80% Number of employees
74% Industry
64% Phone number
Gartner: One Third of Leading
Enterprises Face a Data Crisis
Enterprises are good at collecting data, but not so good at managing it, says the research firm. By Al Urbanski
currently, more than three quarters of individual information management initiatives within
the average organization are isolated from
each other.
Gartner proposes a three-step strategy to
companies looking to avoid a data management crisis:
• Identify the crucial business outcomes that
need improvement or are being influenced by
poor information management
• Determine the business processes and leaders most affected by those outcomes and
study their cases to start setting priorities for
an EIM effort
Corporations and marketing departments have
become engulfed by the rising tides of Big Data,
social networking, and mobile interactions, says
Gartner, and are drowning in technologies for
lack of cogent policies to manage them. As a result, the research company predicts that 33% of
Fortune 100 companies will face an “information
crisis” within the next three years.
“There’s an overall lack of maturity when it
comes to governing information as an enterprise asset,” says Gartner VP Andrew White. “It’s
likely that a number of organizations—unable
to organize themselves effectively for 2020, unwilling to focus on capabilities rather than tools,
and not ready to revise their information strategy— will suffer the consequences.”
Gartner explains that by “manage,” it means
managing information for business advantage
as opposed to merely storing and maintaining
data. Its prescription for corporate business
leaders is to set up enterprise information
management (EIM) functions to identify what
information is vital to a company’s success and
what isn’t. Gartner analysts approximate that,
• Adopt a program management approach
for EIM to identify work efforts, resource
commitments, stakeholder expectations, and
success metrics.
“In a digital economy, information is becoming
the competitive asset to drive business advantage, and it’s the critical connection that links
the value chain of organizations,” White says.
Turning Big Data
into Smart Data
It doesn’t matter how much data you have if you don’t integrate your
data sets, says market researcher Matthias Hartmann. By Allison Schiff
A Little Trouble
with Big Data
87%
Consumers who would click a “Do Not Track”
button if made available
Communispace
30%
Consumers who would pay a 5% premium to
guarantee their data is not collected
Communispace
B-
Average grade marketers received when
asked to evaluate their relationship with data
Domo
52%
Marketing heads who have a greater need
for data and analytics personnel
Deloitte and Salesforce ExactTarget
Marketing Cloud
A journey is defined as the act of traveling from
one place to another. With that in mind, it’s
arguable that the customer journey or path to
purchase no longer exists in any kind of linear,
quantifiable sense.
Well, let’s rephrase: The customer journey is
no longer linear, but it is quantifiable—It’s just
going to take some work, says Matthias Hartmann, CEO of market research firm Gfk.
Direct Marketing News caught up with Hartmann at the Advertising Research Foundation’s
2014 re:Think conference in New York City to
talk about integration, new rules for measurement, data privacy, and the difficulty of a CMO’s
job—and why that’s a good thing.
What are the new metrics marketers need to
be paying attention to?
More and more the customer journey and the
purchase journey are encompassing multiple
channels, which is why it’s obviously very important to truly understand—for all segments—
where consumers go and how they inform
themselves so that [brands] can be there for
the decisive click. Thus it becomes vital for marketers to leverage integrated data. In the past,
marketing was more focused on the creative,
and shall we say intuitive, side. But now marketing has become very fact-based and measurable. Creativity needs to be informed and
fact-based, and then creative can have a role.
That’s the way the pendulum is swinging.
So integration is the name of the game?
It’s all about integration and fusing the various
data sets. What it’s not about is the quantity.
Marketers need to draw the right conclusions
from their data. It’s not enough to get a social
media data stream and think you know everything about your consumer. To truly understand
the consumer across channels and across datasets marketers have to combine those datasets.
What’s the chatter about data privacy?
Early data indicates that consumers are becoming more wary and more aware about
what happens with their data, which is a callto-action back to the industry to do something
about that concern. Just because you can,
doesn’t mean you should. There has been a lot
of innovation in the data space, but now we
have to step back and ask ourselves what proper was is to collect data.
It seems like the CMO’s job is harder than ever.
Would you agree with that?
The CMO finally has a chance to really step up.
On one side, the CMO role is very business-oriented, and on the other side, the role can be
very complex and data-related—but I look at
the opportunity in that statement. The job is
becoming richer as more technology and data
science skills are needed, and that makes the
CMO role more relevant, promising, and interesting than ever before.
Six Big Data Dos and Don’ts
Your marketing team has collected the data. Now learn what to—and what not to—do with it. By Natasha D. Smith
DO use Big Data to focus on the entire customer journey, not just specific parts.
Big data allows marketers to track customers
at each stage of their buying decisions—and it
enables marketers to anticipate and respond to
customer needs from beginning to end.
Wilson Raj, global director of customer intelligence at data software giant SAS shares tips
on how to help marketers turn the Big Data
promise into an actionable—potentially profitable—reality.
THREE DO’S
DO enrich Big Data to gain context about your customer.
One of the best things marketers can do with
this treasure trove of data is to supplement
it with even more information. The reason
is simple: by coupling multiple sets of data,
marketers will get a more holistic view of their
customers’ lives, wants, and needs. Using free
open data—such as census data or weather
information—can also allow marketers to make
relevant, real-time offers.
DO focus on smaller interactions.
Although Raj advises marketers to focus on the
entire customer journey, he warns not to forget
those small, more meaningful customer interactions often fueled by Big Data. “Businesses actually have better campaign performance when
they focus on more frequent, targeted interactions with customers,” he says. “It’s better for
a [marketer] to send 50,000 campaigns to 50
people than 50 campaigns to 50,000 people.”
He adds that Big Data shouldn’t equal giant
campaigns—but actually the opposite. “Big
Data allows you to segment your audience
to more discrete groups—and even [enables
marketers to] get into subcategories, get more
finite, and [include] more detailed preferences.” He says leveraging Big Data in this way
creates more touchpoints with customers and
boosts ROI.
THREE DON’TS
DON’T focus solely on collecting Big Data at
the expense of quality.
Data collection should be strategic. Simply
culling data with no plan to use or enrich it can
leave some marketers feeling overwhelmed and
confused.
“There may be [marketers] who focus solely
on getting as much data as possible,” Raj says.
“But it’s at the expense of determining if the
data is truly valuable.”
DON’T forget the IT department.
In recent years there’s been growing discussion around the continual need for collaboration between marketers and those in IT—even
with some experts suggesting that companies
embrace the emerging role of chief marketing
technologist. Raj says it’s this collaboration
that enables marketers to collect, analyze, and
eventually take action on Big Data. “Make sure
you’re including the people in IT at the outset
of any kind of campaign design,” he says. “They
can really help you navigate a lot the data processes as marketers design, execute, and then
measure the performance of a campaign.” He
says IT can help marketers locate, collect, and
organize Big Data.
DON’T take on large Big Data initiatives; start small.
Small steps can make big goals much more
manageable, Raj says. And this rule applies to
marketers who use Big Data. “A specific goal in
mind—such as better acquisition, better retention, reducing churn or attrition, and those
kinds of things—will help marketers apply Big
Data, analytics, and intelligence [to the areas
that need attention.]” Smaller goals, Raj says,
also will help marketers identify key performance indicators to track progress.
Big Data Is Not Enough
What Big Data can and cannot do—and how “thicker” data can help. By Eric Krell
One of the literary world’s original data scientists knew a thing or two about the limits of
analytics.
Needling the editors of high-brow “East
Coast magazines,” the late writer David Foster
Wallace once remarked that these ivory tower
types dispatched writers to do some “pith-helmeted anthropological reporting on something
rural and heart-landish” whenever they happened to remember that most of the U.S. population lives between the coasts.
Wallace’s wonderful analyses of “heart-landish
culture”—which includes gut-bustlingly funny
and brilliantly insightful pieces on state fairs and
cruise ships derives from his ability to manually
collect large amounts of qualitative data and
then synthesize it into cohesive narratives.
Leading CMOs and marketing functions are
placing greater emphasis on a similar capability, despite all of the brouhaha surrounding Big
Data and analytics.
tailer Coastal Contacts Inc. “However, it’s just as
important for us to talk to people on the street.”
Hoeppner has dispatched dozens of his marketers to shopping malls to interview anyone
with glasses about his or her best and worst
eyewear shopping experiences. Like Hoeppner,
when Simon Fleming-Wood joined Pandora as
the Internet radio company’s first CMO, he and
his team conducted what he describes as “cultural anthropology”: dozens of in-depth, faceto-face interviews to unearth the key pillars of
Pandora’s brand narrative.
These experiences suggest that Big Data has
its limits. Combined with analytics, Big Data is
a must-have marketing capability; however, it
“Companies that rely too much on the numshould be complemented by the collection and
bers, graphs, and factoids of Big Data risk insuanalysis of thicker data. Collecting qualitative
lating themselves from the rich, qualitative reality data can be a time-consuming process, but it
of their customers’ everyday lives,” ReD Assocican yield game-changing results (see Lego) and
ates consultants Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel
add welcomed doses of humanity and exciteRasmussen wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
ment to marketing activities.
In the article, Madsbjerg and Rasmussen deJust ask Dan Wald, a partner at The Boston
scribe this qualitative reality as “thick data,” and Consulting Group (BCG) and a core member
point to their own pith-helmeted field research
of the firm’s consumer packaged goods (CPG)
for Lego as a key component of the toymaker’s group. Wald reports that consumer analytics are
successful business turnaround. “We were sent
driving a lot of consulting projects in the CPG
to play with kids—not in focus groups but in the industry right now, but he quickly adds that his
context of their real lives,” they wrote.
work with CPG marketing teams isn’t limited to
All of the marketing executives whom I’ve
Big Data.
been interviewing each month for our “CMO
Instead, his work “runs the gamut from soConfidential” series promote the importance
phisticated data analytics to qualitative ethnoand value of data analytics; however, these
graphic work,” Wald tells Consulting magazine.
leaders also endorse the importance and value
“I’ve flown to China, and visited the slums of
of thicker data. “It is crucial for us to use a lot of Hangzhou to crawl under people’s sinks and
digital tools, which we do on a daily basis,” says find out what cleaners and pest-control prodBraden Hoeppner, CMO of online eye glasses re- ucts they use.”
A RE M A RK E T E RS
I N DA NG E R O F A
DATA
PROHIBITION?
CONSUMERS
WHO THINK THAT
%
70
%
42
%
39
BUSINESSES
AREN’T TRANSPARENT ABOUT
THEIR DATA USE
NOT ALL CONSUMERS THINK DATA COLLECTION IS THE CAT’S MEOW
VENDORS AND
SUPPLIERS USE THEIR
DATA TO PROVIDE
DE
RELEVANT OFFERS
ERS
THEIR DATA IS
BEING SOLD
RESPONDENTS
R
ESPONDENTS
S
WHO
%
64
%
87
%
56
CONSUMERS
WHO SAY
TOTAL PRIVACY IN A DIGITAL WORLD
IS A THING OF THE PAST
CONSUMERS
WHO LIST THE
FOLLOWING AS THEIR
PREFERRED FORMS
OF BRAND
COMMUNICATION
ONLY 10% OF THEIR
PERSONAL DATA
IS PRIVATE
%
%
80
%
40
ARE CONCERNED
CERNED
ABOUT WEBSITES
EBSITES
TRACKING
G THEIR
PURCHASE
E BEHAVIORS
DON’T THINK THAT
THERE ARE ADEQUATE
SAFEGUARDS IN PLACE TO
PROTECT THEIR DATA
INPUT THEIR CREDIT CARD
INFORMATION FOR EVERY
ONLINE PURCHASE
INSTEAD OF HAVING
IT STORED FOR
FUTURE USE
SHOPPERS
S
HOPP
WHO
WHO
%
49
93
EMAIL
64
WOULD WELCOME TEXT MESSAGES
FROM RETAILERS THAT CONTAIN
OFFERS MATCHING THEIR
PREFERENCES WHILE
THEY’RE IN-STORE
57
SOCIAL
MEDIA
M DIA
ME
WOULDN’T OPPOSE HAVING THEIR
BUYING BEHAVIOR TRACKED IF THEY GOT
RELEVANT OFFERS
%
%
%
44
TEXT
%
25
PHONE
CALLS
SOURCE:
ACCENTURE INTERACTIVE
The Creep Line
How marketers can know if they’ve crossed the line with personal
data. By Natasha D. Smith
We’ve Got
Privacy Issues
80%
Consumers who believe total data privacy no
longer exists
Accenture
66%
Marketers who say data-driven marketing generates
“a great deal” of value to their companies today
Winterberry Group/Direct Marketing Association
62%
Consumers who believe they don’t have enough
control over their privacy when it comes to retailers
IDC Retail Insights
59%
Consumers who report seeing an improvement in
personalized communications from businesses in
the past five years
SAS
There’s a constant push for marketers to provide
customers with even more personalized, relevant,
valuable experiences with brands. Of course, it’s
customer info—those personal details—that make
that happen. When have marketers crossed over
from being personal to just plain creepy and intrusive? Andrew Delamarter, director of search and
inbound marketing at Huge, and Jon Gibs, VP of
analytics for the digital marketing agency, weigh in.
There’s this ongoing discussion about “The
Creep Line”—the benchmark where brand marketers have gone too far with customer data.
Can you define that line?
Jon Gibs: It may be cliché to say this, but you
know [the creep line] when you see it. Different segments [of people] interpret the lines
for different brands. Some people have a lower
threshold than others, and that impacts how
they interact with brands. We’re still trying to determine what creates the sensitivity.
So is there ever a point where brand marketers
are collecting too much data?
Gibs: In my mind it’s not the collection of data
that’s an issue. It’s the use of that data, the security around that data, and of course the value
exchange with the user. And when I say ‘value
exchange,’ I mean the user has to get some value
out of giving up their data.
Andrew Delamarter: It’s more what [marketers]
do with that data that may turn people off.
Obviously, there’s been a lot of talk in the media about data breaches in recent months. And
whether that security breach happened at your
company or another, marketers are affected
across several industries. So how can marketers
gain trust back once the trust is broken?
Gibs: One of the initial findings we’ve had in our
[ongoing research project on data privacy at
Huge] is that even though people say privacy
is the most important thing that a digital brand
can provide them, they’ll report high amounts
of satisfaction and trust with brands that have
relatively low [data] privacy ratings.
Who’s more concerned about data privacy:
marketers or consumers?
Gibs: I would actually say there’s a third group—
the media. It’s very newsworthy when you hear
about a big company taken down by some
anonymous hackers. Gets a lot of attention. But
in truth, [data breaches] often make more of an
impact on storytelling than true impact on an
individual or specific brand.
Delamarter: Smart brands and marketers need
to be thinking about this or it will get worse, especially as we move into an era with the Internet
of Things. Big Data is only going to get bigger.
@CustomerPost:
#DataDriven
#decision making
must be part of #BigData
mix #knowledgetweet
via @analyticsweek
@SAP_MEDIA:
“In time of big wind,
some people build walls
and some people build
windmills.” @jbecher
@SAPInMemory #BigData
@chrisjaybarnett:
Decision-makers look
at the data, but only
10% do what it suggests if it contradicts
their gut feeling #datadriven
@ahampp: “Data is
a universal language.
[And] #bigdata is the
new ‘make it viral’” @tatiana dropping mad
brand/artist science at
#edmbiz right now
@BrennanSpiegel:
#BigData is a
buzzword w/ little
meaning to doctors in
the trenches. But “Thick
Data” matters: the rich
human context
@kdnuggets:
#BigData becoming a
distraction for marketers:
Much talk about big
data but not enough
about big insights
@ISpeakAnalytics: RT
@Aptribute: Companies that apply
#bigdata and #analytics to their
operations show
5-6% higher
profitability
@Hoovers:
No trend has rocked
internal departments
more than the surge
of #bigdata. Don’t
be overwhelmed by
the beast
@hardisterg:
Reacting to
customers on the
fly separates #winners from losers.
Be a winner:
#dataDrivenMarketing
@graemeknows:
“The CMO blessed
them and said “Be
social and increase
our likes, fill the database
and query it often.” The
Book of #BigData, 5:9