• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, January 10, 2014

You make lemonade, not because the lemons were bad, but because you were simply craving some lemonade.

That what’s IXI Services, a division of Equifax, learned a few months ago, when marketers were using its AudienceIntel platform to measure audiences in an unintended way.

The company launched the platform in January 2013 to help advertisers verify whether desired audiences had been reached by ads. Instead, marketers used it to measure the audiences visiting their brand sites, so IXI updated the platform to support that use.

I spoke with Jeff Sporn, the company’s SVP and general manager of digital solutions, and Russ Ayres, its SVP and general manager of customer decision support solutions. Sporn said it made “complete sense” that marketers started using their platform that way, and called it “myopic” on his part to overlook it in the first place.

“[But] one of the great things about the way Russ and his team builds these products and dashboards is that they build a Maserati, even when I ask for a Ford,” Sporn quipped. (No offense, Ford.)

The other thing about the dashboard is that it spits out analytics in real-time. Well, eight seconds, to be exact, but that’s a while lot faster than 31 days.

Here in RTBlog, Joe Mandese and I often write about programmatic media-buying and real-time bidding (RTB), but there’s much more to real-time media and marketing than those two topics. Data management and analytics, for example, are equally as significant.

“People say, ‘Oh, you don’t really need [analytics] to be real-time,’ ” Sporn said. “And it’s sort of true, except that in digital, decisions are made so quickly, I feel like if they have data in real-time, they will make decisions in real-time. If you can only see data month-to-month, then your decisions are monthly.”

Ayres added, “I wouldn’t say that it’s so much real-time decisioning [as it’s] real-time action.” He argued that you may have made the decision, but none of that matters unless you take action.

But marketers are cautious when it comes to quick action. It increases the potential of a screw up, especially on social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Sporn theorized that a balance between assessing enough data to make a smart decision and acting fast enough is required. If you assess for too long, you miss your window of opportunity. If you don’t assess enough, you risk hits to brand image.

Some might argue that’s where algorithms fit -- to sift through and assess Big Data fast enough so that you can take action with confidence. I brought this point up to Sporn and Ayres, and they shot it down, not because algorithms aren’t good (they do), but because they aren’t the end-all be-all.

“It never fails to make me laugh when I hear about folks who have discovered ‘magic algorithms,’” Sporn said. “There are a couple of people that hang onto that word like it’s a magical elixir. There’s nothing new about it."

He continued, “Absolutely algorithms should be used to speed up the optimization of your mix. It’s just math. It’s just hilarious to me…when people hang on the word ‘algorithm’ like it’s new. I do not think algorithms are the future; they are the past and present.” He argued that marketers should not rely on algorithms to do all of the work, or else common sense could be lost.

Either way, Sporn and Ayres believe real-time analytics are required in the digital environment. As Ayres put it: “It helps you make mistakes and bad decisions faster. That way you can fix them sooner.”

But is the discipline that brought the advertising industry to where it is today at risk of being forgotten in the fast-moving digital world?

Sporn said he knows some people that have moved from offline to online marketing and have “gasped” when learning of what little regard is given to careful assessment when making decision -- “I want soccer moms!” is all that matters sometimes.

 “I don’t want to live in a world where people are changing things all the time,” Sporn said. “We still need discipline.”