Commentary

The In-House Trilogy, Part 1: Data Management

Let’s begin the initial piece of a three-part series on taking programmatic in-house by first examining data collection, segmentation and activation as well as offline data syndication, since data are building blocks for all other components. In our age of information, one of the most challenging tasks for businesses is breaking down organizational silos and aligning bespoke departments. The best way to do this is to take control of a data-management platform (DMP) that allows you to make sense of your data.

Strive For Synergy & Integration

Before you can get your data in order, you must first get your organization in order. DMPs offer various and far-reaching opportunities with your data. Various disciplines within your company such as ad effectiveness and CRM are suddenly in the hands of the DMP master chief of your company. It’s imperative that you leverage this powerful technology when you collect online data and syndicate this with first-party offline data. 

Such synergy can result in greater and closer collaboration, the ability to tackle complex issues from a variety of angles -- and most importantly, will allow your data to flow freely internally, making it easier to leverage in external communications. 

It’s not enough to just have the sales and marketing teams involved in the process. In many organizations, business intelligence, revenue management and customer service are the biggest keepers of data. A cohesive and effective work plan needs to be formed between each of these departments. By uniting these bespoke functionalities, data can be syndicated, activated and used where it belongs -- as part of customer experience management – and not left in a separate silo.

Relevance & Efficiency 

The benefit of leveraging your data is twofold: you become more relevant to customers and potential customers by offering them relevant messaging and you increase organizational efficiency by properly managing your yield.

Let’s look at a concrete example. One of the most difficult functions within an airlines company is managing the supply and demand of flights. By looking into your own revenue management system you can see that certain flights are underperforming and likely to depart with empty seats. To alleviate the potential problem, you can increase media pressure on those underperforming flights and present special offers to customers who are looking at similar flights or who have booked similar flights in the past by looking at your frequent flier and behavioral data. 

Marketing technology is not only increasing sales and brand awareness, but has become the catalyst to complete organizational innovation. The above example not only shows a clear performance marketing boost, but also an increase in total efficiency and ancillary revenue generation. This all starts with data, making everything measurable and quantifiable. 

Data Control & Protection

When thinking about efficiency, this is one of the biggest benefits of going in-house. By managing your own data, you spend less time syncing with external parties and mitigate the risk of a disconnection. Going in-house puts personalization and decisioning on your side. All of this leads to being more efficient and more effective. Once you have struck the right balance, you’ll be able to implement and optimize multiple campaigns on the fly in no time. 

Beyond the confines of your own company, your data can be the springboard into new revenue streams. Have you ever thought about targeting campaigns against your CRM data for complementary advertisers? Or a telecom provider who allows cell phone manufacturers to target brand campaigns to users who use their existing cell phone longer than 2 years? Airlines that target campaigns for hotels and car rentals and generate extra revenues with their own data? Or retailers who understand what brands their customers like and target pure branding campaigns against these users? These are just a few of the possibilities that owned data represents. 

By controlling the entire process, you can mitigate many potential problems. At the top of that list is data protection. You’ll no longer need to hand over your valuable and sometimes sensitive data to third parties that could have separate motivations of their own. 

Once you have your data foundation laid out and established, you’ll need to move on to programmatic resources planning and training, which we’ll discuss in part two of our in-house series. 

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