This tweet caught my attention as I scanned my TweetDeck page this morning:
Data geeks invade advertising world. You mean they weren't there already? http://bit.ly/TerIQ
It came from Markos Moulitsas (@markosm), the founder and chief blogger at Daily Kos. Here's a self-taught master of digital communication wondering if high-octane digital data analysis is just now getting to the advertising world. It piqued my curiosity enough to follow the tiny URL to a story in today's New York Times.
A few paragraphs into the report by Stephanie Clifford came this passage...
From the “Mad Men” era until now, advertising has been about a catchy tag line, an arresting image, the Big Idea. But Mr. Herman
[Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management] and his competitors are bringing some Wall Street-like analysis to
Madison Avenue, exploiting the huge amounts of data produced by the
Internet to adjust strategy almost instantly.
“It’s putting
numbers to an industry that never had numbers before,” says Mr. Herman,
27, who started and sold three media and technology companies before
founding Varick last summer. “It’s nice to be able to tell your brand
manager or the chief marketing officer which audience is interacting
with the unit, what time of day, what day of the week, and what the
response is on certain types of offers. Before, nobody could really
tell you that.”
My first reaction was to think that this story was a bit overplayed. And maybe it is. It's not as if marketers have been just winging it. There are all kinds of analytic tools, services and strategies that make Google Analytics look like a training program, and people are using them successfully all over the place.
Or are they?
The old cliche, "walk the walk, not just talk the talk," applies here. Saying one can do the back end is easy; doing all the analysis and responding to it rapidly is the hard part. And, as the Times article suggests, it is not something a lot of marketers and their communication partners are really doing. In a world of self-professed experts and no shortage of firms claiming to have the smarts to do the digital data dirty work, maybe it's time to go with another cliche: Talk is cheap.
Forward-thinking marketing and media firms are embracing detailed real-time data analysis and enjoying the benefits beyond just figuring out which web ad to use, according to Clifford...
Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing
presentation, now they are at the core of the on line strategy. What’s
more, they can help advertisers save money in traditional media by
testing different phrases or images on-line to see what works before
producing an expensive television commercial or magazine ad. Who
attracts more clicks in a grape juice ad, for example — the blond girl
or the brown-haired boy?
The shift to data-based campaigns is
forcing marketers to learn new skills and drawing a new breed of worker
to Madison Avenue. While most data executives now in the field came
from media backgrounds, they are recruiting Wall Street math geniuses
because the job requires hourly adjustments in strategy based on
numbers.
When I started in the advertising business nearly 30 years ago as a media planner, media people were lucky to be invited into the strategic planning process until it was well underway... if at all. By the turn of the millennium, best practices had the media people up first, determining and explaining how resources would be best deployed and in what medium in order to best meet strategic objectives. That's why the major agency holding companies spun media into separate business units. It wasn't just consolidation of spending clout; it was the aggregation of a lot of research and analysis resources.
It's happening again, but now in the area of data analysis...
Major advertising holding companies like WPP, the Publicis Groupe, Havas, MDC Partners and the Interpublic Group
are starting data practices, hoping to latch onto what is expected to
be the fastest-growing category of online advertising in the next five
years.
As a wise old baseball man once said, it's deja vu all over again. As much as I didn't want to see media strategy groups separated from the creative agencies, the powers that ran the big agency holding companies were right in making that move. I have a feeling they are correct this time as well. The independent and smaller shops would be wise to invest in this area too, lest they lose another piece of the marketing budget -- and the control that goes with it -- to an outside partner who not only understands the data but can act on it immediately.
If I had any advice to give to marketers when they are meeting with advertising, PR and Internet agencies, I'd encourage them to ask a few questions right off the bat:
Would you please introduce me to your analytical team? I'm not talking about your research people; I want to visit with the folks who will crunch the data. And how are you going to harness that data on the fly so we know what's working while we are doing it, not after the fact?
If you get that deer-in-the-headlights look from them or, worse, they shine you on with a few catch-phrases and book references, you may want to rethink that partnership. Find someone who can actually walk the walk. Or, perhaps better said, who can run the run.
[Read Stephanie Clifford's entire article here.]