• by Karl Greenberg , December 4, 2013

Data for data's sake is garbage. That was a major point presenters made at the Association of National Advertisers’ Real-Time Marketing Conference in New York on Wednesday. Everyone has a lot of data, but knowing how to use it means knowing how to exploit it for your goals in real-time and make it easy for marketers to access. 

Bob Rupczynski, VP of media, data and customer relationship management at Kraft Foods, said the company has metrics all the way down to store sales. "For us, data incorporates all pieces of marketing communications. But if you don't have infrastructure, you can't leverage it."

For the company's Lunchables product, the challenge was how to keep kids aging out of the lunchbox phase interested in the product. The company partnered with pro skateboarder, actor, and reality TV star Rob Dyrdek for its first iterative campaign with 17 pieces of content on YouTube and social, adjusting the content weekly based on real-time insights.

Lisa Donohue, CEO of Starcom USA, which handles Kraft, said programs like this aren't about making "ads." "It was about those 17 pieces of short-form content driving engagement rather than finding one ad that's a common denominator."

Donohue and Rupczynski argued for a five-point approach to real-time marketing: 

1. Strong data strategy, paired with an enterprise approach to breaking down silos. Rupczynski said Kraft, for example, collapsed all departments touching media and data into one department.

2. Infrastructure in place driving a different culture about marketing and building brands.

3. Understand the importance of content, and know how to write and deliver it nimbly.

4. Have an attribution model.   

5. Organizations need to educate people about real-time, what it means to be agile, why it makes sense and how to operate in that world. 

Victor Lee, VP global digital marketing at Hasbro (in a combination standup routine, lecture on risk taking, and case study presentation), said data and execution matter little if the content isn't compelling enough to crack the chaos of relevant news and inane social content. Lee led a social program for Hasbro's Monopoly game around letting people vote for updated versions of game playing pieces -- those familiar tokens of a car, iron, top hat, and a shoe. The effort was a huge success, attracting not only individuals but brands -- all of whom had ideas about new pieces. 

The campaign also won top-tier earned media, and votes from all over the world. "The PR team got calls: 'We are a shoe company; we want to lobby for shoes to stay in the game. The iron-worker's union lobbied for the wheelbarrow. The bacon society was pushing for a bacon playing piece. Purina lobbied for the cat (which became the new icon.) It was brilliant. We realized people do care about it. And we sat back and watched it happen.” He said 185 countries voted. “More countries voted than participated in the Olympics."

Lee said the program worked because the game is ubiquitous, and people are passionate about those pieces. “They'll refuse to play if they don't get the piece they want.” The bottom line, he said, is, "If you just say, 'Look at me, I'm awesome, I'm awesome, look at me,' nobody cares. And they know when they are being told to do something. Saying you're real to be real isn't real."