Commentary

Real Scarce For Marketers: Time

Real-time marketing can be incredibly effective, but it doesn’t come without its costs. Turns out, one of them is, well, time.

A new report being released today by the CMO Council and IBM Watson finds that most organizations don’t have enough time to manage the consumer data they have access to: first-, second- or third-party.

The report, which is covered in detail in today’s Research Intelligencer, found that 47% of respondents said “there are just not enough hours in the day to address all of the transformation projects that are needed to activate data.”

That’s nearly the same percentage of respondents citing the scarcity of “talent” and “tools” as top barriers to getting the most out of data.

Not surprisingly, the biggest time-sucks vary by discipline. Among marketers — which represented 44% of the study’s respondents — “manipulating” spreadsheets and reports was the No. 1 drain on time, followed by “content management.”

“For many teams, time is being spent -- and perhaps wasted in some cases -- manipulating and managing spreadsheets and reports,” the report concludes. “When you consider earlier findings pointing to the lack of connected, real-time systems that demand access and processes that involve manual transfer of data and information across complex systems, this is hardly a surprise. Teams are also spending considerable time tagging and managing content, from images to content.”

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