Data is the kingpin in marketing. That's nothing new.
For one thing, it can lead to new hires. When Rob Jonas was announced as Factual's new SVP of revenue, CEO Gil Elbaz stated that
what impressed him most about Jonas was his enthusiasm for data, among other things. New talent is being brought on to help
strategize how to make data work harder and more efficiently for targeting, creating audience segments and more.
And there are almost too many data-based acquisitions to count. Time Inc. recently announced that it had acquired Viant Technology, a data-marketing company that owns
Myspace and other properties. IBM’s digital agency Interactive Experience scooped up three digital agencies last week: a marketing and creative agency called Resource/Ammirati, a digital
marketing agency called Aperto, and a digital agency called ecx.io. And Telenor, a Norwegian telecommunications company, announced earlier this month that it had acquired Tapad, a New
York-based cross-device retargeting startup that claims to track billions of data points across multiple screens.
Most recently, Time Warner Cable launched Kernel Connect,
which integrates anonymous aggregated linear TV data and data from digital advertising and third parties. The product offers clients "unprecedented transparency into their media investments," the
company stated.
Still, research from
eMarketer shows that only about 6% of marketers
can reliably track a customer on all of the customer’s devices.
And only 5% of client-side marketers said they were doing an excellent job at making improvements and
changes based on insights derived from customer data, according to March 2015 research by
Econsultancy.
Will amassing data lead to more data-driven marketing -- or just more souped-up ad tech products and services? Time will tell. For more on ad tech's obsession with building,
acquiring and managing data, be sure to check out MediaPost's Programmatic Insider Summit, streaming live this week, and #MPProgrammatic.