Marketing in the Digital Age: Winning with Data & Analytics by DataXu.
This paper was quoted by the blog I cited in Let’s Party Like it’s 1994!.
It is a helpful report but some cautions:
- At page 6, the estimated 300 billion in health care savings. This is like RIAA’s estimates of $billion dollar piracy in countries with less than 1 million inhabitants. It’s not shared reality beyond the RIAA marketing department.
- At page 9, the chart would have you believe current difficulties are about 1/3 “Lack of software/technology to perform analytics on digital marketing data.” Sigh, that is, and always is, wrong.
Repeat five (5) times: Technology cannot fix personnel issues. (Like lack of talent, insight, inter-departmental moats, etc.)
Technology is almost always seized upon as an answer because it avoids the tough decisions. Like firing department heads who won’t cooperate with other departments. Or who say: “Our requirements are unique because no one else does it this way.” (I have an answer for that observation if you would like to hear it sometime.) Or who say: “Our staff can’t do X (whatever X may be).” (I have an answer for that observation as well.)
- At page 18, the use of outsiders for analysis of digital marketing suffers from a lack of ROI information. That should be a clear warning sign. If you can’t get ROI data from an outsider, how are you going to get it with digital marketing in-house?
- At page 22, “5 Ways You Can Profit from Big Data”
1. By creating transparency. Organizations that make Big Data available to more stakeholders can accelerate and improve decision-making and cycle times, and reduce search costs;
Ask anyone who promises you better decision-making to show you examples of the same. On a consistent basis due to big data, controlling all other variables.
- At page 29, absence of a cross-channel digital marketing platform “…as the most significant impediment to more money flowing to digital marketing.”
That’s a misconception of the problem. No sane business wants more money flowing to digital marketing. Sane businesses want more ROI and if increasing money flowing to digital marketing does the trick, so be it. But digital marketing for its own sake isn’t a goal, at least not a useful one. With or without a cross-channel digital marketing platform.
If your use of “big data” doesn’t result in understandings cut across departments, teams and even customers, then you may be losing market share and not even know it. At least not immediately.