Event report: Forget big data- we need ‘smart data’

The annual Teradata Conference took place this week, looking at the state of marketing in the age of connected devices and an increasingly digital-savvy audience. Speakers from Puma, Facebook and even footballing legend Geoff Hurst toojk to the stage to discuss where technology is taking marketing…

The annual event, celebrating its 10th year took place in London at Wembley Stadium, one of the most iconic venues in the world, on June 9th-10th, 2015. Over 1000 CMOs, senior marketers and digital marketers attended the two day event, to discover trends and best-practices on insight-driven marketing, digital and omni-channel marketing plus marketing resource management.

Presenters include marketing leaders and innovators from some of the world’s leading brands and organisations such as Runtastic, Standard Life, Havas helia, Puma and Facebook, alongside keynote presentations by the likes of Rusty Warner, Principal Analyst serving Customer Insights Professionals at Forrester Research. A panel of football celebrities including Sir Geoff Hurst, Mike Forde and Pierluigi Collina will explore the science behind data, marketing and football.

Key highlights are below:

Andre Schiek – Grey Dusseldorf
‘Digital Innovation – Master the Customer Journey’

There are many different expertise that now fall under the umbrella of digital, but digital marketers must ensure that everything they do is human-centric. We’re becoming increasingly reliant on touchpoints, but we’ll see them increase in popularity and start to include everything from our fridge freezer to our car.

Marketers must find a way to get their message to consumers and find a way to reach ‘the human’ whilst analysing their data. Therefore, ‘brands are the factor and create value’ for the consumer – and if they don’t have value, then they have failed. Currently, the markets in Asia and America are increasing with digital innovation as they are thinking on a larger scale than Europe.

Brands who think they are ‘safe’ from digital innovation have become too complacent, and if they don’t start thinking about ways to innovate and move to the next level, then they will not survive in their industry. We’ve seen the change from printed books to digital consumption (through Amazon) and, more recently, Tesla are leading the way for innovation within the automotive industry. Another innovative company in the automotive sector is Uber, who apply the philosophy of using the real world as a lab that you should experiment against – and other brands should apply this to their thinking.

For brands that want to me innovative, there are three recommendations Andre made:

1. Be innovative through radical collaboration. Your ideas need to have fricition and you have to be prepared to look at what other companies are doing, and what technologies they are using in order to create something that stands out.
EXAMPLE: Sound Cloud’s depiction of The Berlin Wall. More details can be found here.

2. Stop stand-alone transformation units or labs. Companies need orchestration and support of a creative moderator who can handle the creative process and attach the philosophy to the core of the business, so that values are consistent throughout.
EXAMPLE: Volvo’s life spray – details can be found here.

3. Focus on people and their customer journey. Your ideas must be user-centric and allow you to make a relevant case to expand the business.

EXAMPLE: German Wings Corridor Targeting (with Skype).

Brands shouldn’t be talking about ‘big data’ anymore, they should be talking about ‘smart data’ and use it contextually to understand how their users think and feel. That’s how you create value.

Steve Hatch – Facebook

‘The Mobile Canvas: Creativity in a Connected Age’

Growth in mobile is moving at a faster pace than ever before, but the story is about people, discovery and sharing, and not about technology. There have been three key trends that are to be noted by marketers:

1. The transition from desktop to mobile

TV took 67 years to reach 1 billion outlets, yet the smart phone only took 5 years to do the same, highlighting the immense speed of digital development. Mobile growth is also synonymous with the growth of video. There are currently 25 million mobile daily active users in the UK and 4 billion video views per day on Facebook alone (compared to 1 billion one year ago)

2. The move away from text based communications to visual communications

We process visual imagery 60,000 times faster than words. Nearly ¾ of an advert we remember occurs in first 10 seconds, and half of that is within 3 seconds. Brands are underestimating the indvidual’s capacity to retain visual communciations. The use of image has also extended into Instagram – brands upload photos without taglines and must understand the implicit power of visual.

3. The shift from search to discovery

‘Everything competes with everything that has ever been made’. The gap between content creation and capacity is widening, meaning that there is heavy competition. Our capacity as humans to consume has increased, but it is not keeping up with the amount of things requesting our attention.

Brands should consider changing ‘from physics to chemistry’. Those in marketing can understand the ‘physics’ of targeting and finding appropriate moments, however they must now find the connection (aka chemistry) with the consumer in order to be effective. There are a number of ways that brands are able to do this:

1. Personalisation – this makes thing more valuable for the consumer, and the US are emerging as leaders of personalised videos to those on social media.

2. Storytelling – consumers need to be taken on a journey in order to maintain their level of interest

3. Pivoting – this places relevance on certain aspects of your campaign that appeal to the consumer

Depending on the audience, brands are changing their videos in order to create a connection. Examples of this include EE and Interstellar, who use details such as age, gender and location in order to make their videos more relevant. This requires different levels of execution. There’s now a way brands can personalise content on a large scale by using information they know about their audience.

The answers that brands need are always with the customers. Often the biggest barrier is changing their habits, or being brave enough to move away from re-working campaigns they have ran before. Brands that simply re-work are behind where their customers are. Business processes need to be looked at, and some marketers find it a struggle to communicate the value of video and personalisation to the business. This is largely due to businesses being transfixed on numbers and where the return on investment can be located.

Data is not a barrier to creativity – it’s a muse. It’s always best to share your data with creators so that the end result is relevant – it’s much better to use insight to shape a campaign as it’s cheaper to test and adapt ideas rather than leave the whole campaign behind. Companies must re-evaluate their exisiting KPIs as click-based metrics don’t tell the whole story. People who like to share content represent less than 1% of those that go on to buy a product. Campaigns that are engineered only for engagement are riskier in terms of ROI. Engagement should be an outcome and not an objective set at the beginning of the campaign.

Stephen Brobst, Teradata

‘Jumpstart your Mobile IQ: Master the Omnichannel World’

SPace + tIME = SPIME which can be defined as ‘an object that is aware of space and time’. Humans are now all SPIMEs due to constantly being in close proximity to their mobile devices. As a result eCommerce has now become mCommerce and geocontext is increasingly important. For data driven marketing, location is very important and data knowledge can be used to add value for the consumer. Context is now key.

Historically, B2C has been the term used by brands to represent communication, yet there’s now been a power shift meaning it can be seen as C2B communication. Mobile spend on adverts is expected to exceed £2.5 billion in 2015 in order to target consumers on the go with marketing opportunities.

A prediction for the future is that there will be a privacy backlash against clumsy marketers. Different people have different perceptions about what is/isn’t acceptable when it comes to location settings, and brands must get the balance right. However, it is important for brands to recognise that, although mobile is growing, there are a number of ways to communicate with customers and some will inevitably not like mobile communication. Banks are still introducing text-banking or postal communications, although if you choose not to use some channels, you have to make a conscious decision that you are leaving behind some of your customers.

Mobile is a customer channel that generates interaction and a transaction of data. The data from mobile can be mixed with other data to drive new insights which then creates new context to work with. Looking to the future, mobile is the channel that will drive decisions and revenue so brands should be investing in this. Companies that use postcodes for location and make assumptions about people on their post code aren’t using insight. There’s no excuse today to now know where your customers are and it’s now time to use mobile as a hub for customer interactions and real time context.

Sports Panel

‘Can you quantify the beautiful game just like we quantify business?’

Data in sport has increased recently and is now extremely useful for recruitment. There are over 13,000 football players in Europe, so managers and coaches are unable to know what the best signings will be in the future without data. Gut instinct is still a huge part of football, but data can enhance decisions and allow those making them more insight so better decisions can be made. As a result, it is becoming a good risk management strategy.

When looking at grassroots football, at this stage data is not part of the game and nor should it be. You have to separate youth development with professional sport – there’s a he problem generating data about younger age groups.

According to Geoff Hurst the rise of data and statstics within the football game is becoming boring – punditry is too long before the game and part of sport should always be it’s unpredictable nature. It therefore appears that too much data to analyse can result in the sport losing its magic.

When looking at how referees can use data as part of the game, it’s interesting to know that data allows referees to analyse characters and style of play, which then shapes where they stand on the pitch and how they see the match. Pierluigi Collina admits that there’s a great deal of data on ill-behaved players available to referees but urges referees to let it not cloud their judgement or influence decisions later in the match.

Mike Forde acknowledged that within the sport there can be too much data and not enough insight which then creates a war for data. This has impacted decision making and the clubs responsibility is now to use this data as a way to communicate with fans and engage their club as a business.