• by Katie Meier , March 31, 2015

What are the stems of meaning for data in advertising? We take for granted that data is valuable for at least these three things:

Acquisition – using data to gain more consumers.

Retention – using data to retain consumers longer through better predictive and recommendations.

Surprise and discovery – using data to find people more things they like.

What if we established new stems, that multiplied the meaning for data?

What if data were valuable for everything above, multiplied by just two things?

Transformation -- using data to fill in gaps in understanding in civic, state, government, even global projects. Think of what advertising data about mobile use could tell a smart cities project in the developing world about how to create a city designed for people on the go.

Acceleration -- using data to fill in gaps that help solve civic, state, government, even global problems. Think of what advertising data about where and when to message people could have done to accelerate the speed of sign ups for the Affordable Health Care Act.

What’s clear at this point is that we don’t have a problem getting enough data. We have a problem multiplying its uses.

What’s next is learning to multiply what we have -- Multiply the uses. Multiply the streams. Multiply the users. I’m going to start by multiplying my partners who think the way I do about data. I’m going to find anyone and everyone in the industry that wants to find multipliers for its uses.

If you’re not into data, ask yourself what you are into. Then find a way to multiply its uses. And after that, don’t let anyone tell you it can’t work, and find all the allies you can.