Why Brands Need to Own Their Technology and Data Assets

As the media landscape continually changes and new privacy laws are introduced, understanding and taking action on your brand’s data is more important than ever. But when it comes to making decisions based on the information your brand needs, rarely does all of the information and ROI data you’re looking for arrive on a silver platter. It often shows up segmented, from various MarTech tools and sources and in different formats, making it difficult for brands to streamline and act upon that data and stay ahead of the curve.

Understanding the ROI of digital campaigns and knowing if a specific media buy was effective is imperative in being able to adjust your strategy to be optimized for your business. Yet a 2018 Nielson report found that only 26% of CMOs were very confident or extremely confident in their ability to accurately quantify digital media ROI.

In order to ensure that their needs are being met, brands typically outsource Marketing into segments, managed by different agencies or firms. While one handles display, the other focuses on affiliate, and another on paid search – you get the idea. Because when you’re spending up to 46% of your total revenue on Marketing and Advertising every year, you want things to be done right.

So if brand marketing is being handled by the experts, why the need to own the data? Three primary reasons:

Reporting

Marketers in-house and out have to justify their spend with reporting and it isn’t just about impressions anymore. With the ad world changing daily, the need to improve processes to be more efficient and demonstrate ROI never ends but does get more complicated.

Marketing and Analytics teams are usually on separate teams or even outside of the organization. While both are expected to sync up reporting between the internal and external teams, the reports often tell different stories, because they’re not collected and tracked by the same tools, cadence or metrics. This causes frustration within the organization, because when you don’t know which data to believe it’s impossible to make data-driven investment decisions that will positively impact the organization.

Working side by side, however, the “Art and Science” teams of the organization can better:

– Measure: Determine the impact of ad campaigns

– Optimize: Recommend changes in format, approach or spending to improve results

– Experiment: Design and test different media and messages across platforms

– Segment: Identify groups and subgroups of customers and prospects

– Model: Build predictive models to improve response rates

– Personalize: Communicate messages derived from data to inspire better decisions

Actionable Insights

When brands outsource varying Marketing efforts, it’s almost a guarantee that outside resources don’t collaborate. Even when brands ask the right questions, the data usually comes in different formats, at different times and from multiple sources. Without a single and unified view into performance metrics, are brands basing campaigns on anything more than a hunch?

If you’re only acting on partial insights, that means you’re missing out on crucial information you need to make informed decisions. But when you own your own data, you arm your business with the capability to dive into much more granular data, surface deeper insights and drive smarter campaigns. When invaluable intel is available, such as detailed audience segmentation, it allows you to align analytics with your overarching business goals to optimize your Marketing and make data-driven decisions based on predicted behavior instead of past tendencies.

When upwards of 40% of the budget is dedicated to Marketing and Advertising, it can lead to huge discrepancies and be the difference in millions of dollars won or lost in a year.

Transparency

As a marketer, you need to own the keys to your house. January 1, 2020, will see the implementation of nine new privacy regulations nationwide, forcing brands to think about data policies that prioritize consent from consumers. For some, this may mean a dedicated internal data protection officer, in order to securely manage data assets and usage and to mitigate risk from both parties.

Additionally, without access to your platforms and ownership of your data, you can’t have a complete picture of media buys, what they cost and how they’re being optimized. Obviously, it’s not always financially sensible or advantageous to own all of those efforts in-house. It’s important to stop insulating campaigns within Marketing departments and instead start building relationships with the analytics teams to see the larger picture, like how specific campaigns are affecting website KPIs and how they’re driving incremental business uplift.

While some departments or teams are uncovering insights in customer journeys, oftentimes, that data never makes its way to the media team. And even as companies like Google are looking to “connect the pipes,” the real change needs to happen in the way teams collaborate and share information.

It goes without saying that siloing these efforts is no longer an option. Marketers need to close the loop between analytics and activation, and set equivalent metrics for each agency to measure upon. Determining upfront how you want your data presented and at what cadence should be in place from day one, eliminating a headache down the road. Transparency and ownership into your own data also diminish the possibility of it ending up out of your control, or worse, in the wrong hands.

When media and data are united, it leads the way for teams to make better connections with customers. Relevance, Predictability, and Personalization are all tied to data and are more important to consumers than ever before. Delivering true personalization means accessing a single view of your customers with information pulled in from all your Marketing platforms.

So before you close out the week, get the meeting set with the media and data teams. Let the left hand know what the right is doing and how you can begin to build visibility into your campaigns, performance, and goals.

Read more: Best Practice, Transparency, and Measurement to Define Digital OOH In 2020