Technology companies, from Uber, Google to Facebook, hold growing stores of data about user behaviors. This data has become a source of huge competitive advantage for them. Google uses insights from the Google Display Network and YouTube to create over 100 predefined affinity segments like “30 minute chefs” and “sports fans”.
Today the data size that these companies own has become so large that government officials and academics want access to it. Uber recently shared a treasure trove of transportation data that it said local officials could use to help cut down on commute times and improve traffic flow.
Uber Movement shows data for four cities — the Washington metro area, Boston, Manila and Sydney: read more about this here http://wapo.st/2jtLEdl
Very few industries share data. At some level, every industry measures results and tests products, offers and media.But they don’t share customer data.
And yet, few companies cover an entire market segment vertically. Most sell only a specialised set of related products. The sellers of related products would do well to share information with one another. Not many companies, however, are willing to share customer data for the common good. My experience as a marketer has shown me that data sharing partnerships are not easy to establish. Co-branded credit cards are one way that Banks have created to get access to customers from other partners. But these partnerships don’t really add value to the co brand as much. The bank profits from it but not enough customer knowledge flows to the co branding partner.
But there is a huge amount of common data that is now available. According to a March 2015 study conducted by E marketer 11 % of marketers participate in co-ops to find new customers and personalize marketing campaigns.
The rise of the ‘like’ economy has led to a huge surge in information. Thanks to social networking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and internet gate-keepers such as Google, digital marketers are able to tap into a treasure trove of consumer affiliations. All the data about your Brands being left by consumers as “digital exhaust” is out there for all to analyse.
Facebook controls the most “like” data, recording more than 80 billion per month at last check. But Twitter records more “talking” than anyone else (1.5 billion tweets per month); Amazon collects the most reviews (well over 6 million per month); and Google’s YouTube and Google Display Network have data on how a billion people prefer to spend their time.
The sheer volume of data out there is becoming quite overwhelming, but the maturation of online advertising, and in particular brand advertising, hinges on the effective monitoring of social behaviours, believes research agency Forrester. Such behaviours reveal long-term emotional drivers, as opposed to search behaviour, which reveals shorter-term, rational clues. A new research group within Facebook, is working on an emerging and powerful approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Applying this method to data shared on Facebook could allow for novel features and perhaps boost the company’s ad targeting.
As companies do a better job of capturing accurate transaction information, they build a valuable asset not only for themselves, but also for other marketers. Savvy marketers are looking for partners with whom they can trade their data. Data’s value increases when it’s shared, and you can make money by selling it.
Sharing increases data’s value by reinforcing crucial relationships in the business ecosystem.
1. The data you receive in return adds valuable marketing perspective that you probably can’t get on your own.
2. Sharing data helps transform your channel relationships from transactional into long-term partnerships, which can fend off price competition and open doors to other co-marketing activities.
The shared economy of data lets owners capitalize on the First party data they are already collecting. First-party data can be gathered from a marketers’ site traffic, CRM database, or customer purchase history
So can pooling data be the solution for brands to fight Google, Facebook & Amazon?
Google and Facebook are now commanding 85 percent of incremental digital ad spending, with publishers left to fight it out over the leftovers. So German publishers have put aside traditional rivalry and initiated an interesting data pooling exercise. Axel Springer, Gruner, RTL owner Bertelsmann Group, and Der Speigel owner are among eight of the 10 biggest publishing groups in Germany to be pooling masses of reader data, from just under 1,000 websites including tabloid Bild, and other major titles.The raw data goes into a single platform called Emetriq, a subsidiary owned by Deutsche Telekom, which sifts through and cleans it up, to create highly targeted, quality audience segments that publishers can use to boost their advertising packages.
eBay now enables advertisers to use the data about how visitors browse the site, what they buy, and more, which the company kept as proprietary until now, to target ads and increase return on investment. Even though personally identifiable information won’t be provided to advertisers, eBay visitors’ search and purchase data alone could be a goldmine to consumer product brands. Suddenly, brands have an exponentially greater ability to get the right ads in front of the right audiences. In other words, eBay (like Amazon before it) is monetizing its customer data by allowing advertisers to retarget the eBay audience. Ads must be purchased through eBay in order for brands to access this customer data, and eBay will handle its own ad buying as well as the ad buying for all of the third-party marketers accessing its data.
Forrester has dubbed this social, emotional data the ‘database of affinity.’ With all of this information comes the incredible power of accurate brand advertising, but actually wading through the dense and what now appears to be endless amounts of data will be the greatest challenge.
So what does this mean for Marketers?
1. How are you getting all this social data together into one platform for your brand teams to analyse?
2. You don’t own this data & the Facebook’s & Linked In’s of the world own it. So how are you creating a Social CRM strategy that allows you to directly engage with customers & own that data. Important for brands to add in data capture forms into their promotions to help build out data they need for a Social CRM strategy. If you don’t ask, you don’t get and you don’t own. That’s the reality of social media marketing.
3. And how are you linking social with the rest of your CRM efforts? Do you have a “one View” of CRM?
4. How are you creating data partnerships with other brands? Is someone senior enough looking at driving data partnerships?
Here is an interesting article on Forrester’s definition of the “Database of affinity”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2013/04/15/why-google-not-facebook-will-build-the-database-of-affinity/
