• by Jason Uechi , Op-Ed Contributor, June 23, 2016

Brands and agencies are swimming in data, and they are benefiting enormously from insights that make their campaigns smarter and better targeted. The promise of “Big Data” is to amplify creative and make an impact that has largely been fulfilled.

While this infusion of data is transforming the practice of digital marketing for the better, it is also making it more complex. Marketers now have so much data at their fingertips that they often struggle to make sense of it and to establish effective measurement standards that gauge whether data-rich campaigns are resonating with consumers. However, for all the data that marketers now have access to, data itself is not the answer.

Although brands and agencies know their campaigns’ results in terms of impressions, clicks, installs and other metrics and they can track that against their spend, they don’t have much visibility into how their buy is actually working. And this problem has been compounded by the rise of programmatic.

Those of us who live and breathe all things digital media know the real task for marketers and data scientists alike is to give these data points meaning by identifying the human stories that are at their core. Here's how.

1) Telling the story of the modern mobile consumer is no easy task. The new consumer journey involves shoppers zigzagging between devices, platforms, and the online and offline worlds before ever setting foot in a store or actually making a purchase.

2) The consumer journey remains increasingly fragmented, but one could easily say that the marketer’s journey through all this data is far more complex. There’s really never a “finish line” for a marketer -- each campaign provides more data and more opportunities to refine and optimize for future campaigns. But that’s the only way we can work toward building better, more effective digital marketing campaigns in the future.

3) Analyzing detailed marketing campaigns becomes the role of a data scientist -- to interpret data points and identify and understand the triggers that lead customers to visit a store or to make a purchase. Simply “buying” audience segments from a data provider or counting clicks and impressions haphazardly from digital marketing campaigns won’t answer that question. Even with all the mountains of data we have access to in this programmatic world, one thing is clear: if data gets lost in translation from online to offline, from click to purchase, from intent to performance, there is absolutely no amount of sophisticated probability theory that can recover marketing dollars lost.

4)  This is why transparency has become a major concern for marketers. They are no longer satisfied with the wink and nod that formerly sufficed from their partners, and instead want true visibility from media sellers and ad-tech vendors. At the end of the day, they’re interested in ROI for the current campaign, but also insights and analytics that could help inform future campaigns. The beauty of all this data is that it encourages us to keep on learning and refining. The end of one campaign is merely a starting 
point for the next.

There are literally mountains of data out there, but data is not the end -- it's the beginning. As marketers, we must sift through that data and convert it into knowledge that helps bring us closer to campaign goals, and ultimately target customers.

As data science continues to mature as a marketing discipline, we will see brands and agencies apply it to their businesses in new and innovative ways. In particular, I think we have just begun to see what mobile location data can do in terms of ad targeting, measurement and attribution.