Stop. Before going any farther, what is your favorite commercial of all time? Got it?
This is exactly the first (surprise) question Shula Sinclair of MEC asked the panel. Would you believe 2 out of the 4 said a Christmas commercial? The other 2 said a commercial with pro-sports themes.
While everyone agrees emotionally-charged advertisement campaigns have power, the panel of data experts discussed how to use the two, data and emotion, in synergy. Rich Harris of Oracle Data Cloud Group discusses how his team pulls data on consumers from all kinds of sources, big and small. That data is linked together to create an “unified identity graph.” This enables Oracle to “create audiences from that data, so that marketers can identify people and show the right campaign to people…to evoke emotion, the right kind of emotion.” Then, they in turn measure the results of that campaign to fine-tune the process. This answered Jay Sears of Mastercard’s conversation point of trying to create a holistic audience-marketing plan from data.
Scott Allen of UK Microsoft suggests using both external and internal data to forecast more than just looking at results. He has combined his creatives with, what he calls his “scientists,” or data driven people, so they work together to create plans together instead of focusing on just landmarks in the data. It’s important to not think about creativity and data as two separate things. Scott also emphasizes the importance of bringing in company leaders on the marketing plan, making sure all leadership understand the investment in data, going to “make market,” or finding more market share, with the data investment.
“We are working with our customers to help them to not just use the data in terms of attribution, but how do you turn that into an emotive experience,” David Burnand of Adobe says about having both sides of the Adobe house, creative cloud and data, help their customers. Adobe says interest in marketing and creative groups really making data measurement a goal is finally taking off. One of the problems has been the lack of mature data and commitment to getting data, but in the last 12 months Adobe has seen more commitment.
Scott agreed, and asked how many have really committed a budget to finding marketing data on their business and audience? We see teams have invested heavily in content for example, but it’s time to go to your boards, to your management and put an investment in the data in order for it to work.
When asked what the perfect data-marketing strategy outcome would be, Rich gave an answer close to my own data-loving-marketing-background-heart, “Ultimately, the marketer’s job is to drive more sales of a particular product. So, if you can measure that…then that is the ultimate measure of success, if you can also link it to it being caused by the campaign.”
Scott leaves the panel with his final opinion, “Don’t think about creativity and data as two separate things. Data does not have to be bland; data does not have to be boring, it can actually help you to be more creative, it allows you then to be better at some of the marketing that you do, which means by default, you’ll be more emotionally connected” and, my favorite quote of the panel:
“Done is better than perfect.”