One of my hobbies is running, and before I start races or even go for a few laps around my neighborhood, I prepare by hydrating with plenty of fluids and stretching out my muscles. Without preparation, I can’t perform properly. While the topic of preparation applies to one of my favorite activities, the same can be applied to almost anything, and cloud-based data is no exception. Brands need to begin to adjust their strategies to continue to capture and connect meaningful customer insights across multiple devices (aka “the cloud”).
I entered the workforce during the dot-com era, and it wasn’t very long before I realized I needed to get closer to the data side, to better understand how marketing strategy can come to bear for brands. For all the ways we want to engage as customers and as marketers, data has always been at the core of all this. So for me, this opportunity to lead the Acxiom team that make fact-based decisions that drive successful business outcomes for our clients is a perfect fit.
Brands, particularly large ones, bring in vast amounts of data every second. Each time a person engages with a brand online, whether on social media, a website, a banner ad, or an email, that data is stored. Put more simply, it “sits” and waits to be captured by the brand. Here’s where preparation comes in: If the brand isn’t prepared to capture the data, it simply “sits” there until it is utilized. All too often, companies are not prepared and don’t have the capacity to bring together disparate pieces of data, and brands are left with no other option than to go with their gut feeling on what people want and need.
To fix this, even before platforms are put in place, businesses must have the proper organizational structure. More specifically, they must collaborate across departments. At Acxiom, we work with the data scientists, marketers and business users who are thinking about big questions for their business: How do I make decisions? How do I best build a customer experience that matters? On the analyst side, they’re thinking about all the little granules of data, and how to bring them together and make sense of them. Ultimately, brands simply need a way to put that information together. At Acxiom, we refer to this as”identity.”
Recently my team launched new cloud-based analytic, decision science and visualization capabilities. Why does this matter? Because the cloud connects different devices into a single integrated system. The cloud can store data from various sources and can maintain its lightning-fast speeds even as storage space is steadily taken up.
The beauty of the cloud is that it can be used across different types of businesses and adapted to fit their individual needs. Cloud-based systems are ideal, whether a company is a small online retailer or a large Fortune 500 corporation. Depending on the size and structure of the company, workflows can be built that integrate with different software systems and allow them to “talk” to one another. This flexibility can help address data governance as well. In the past few months, third-party cookies have been in the news. Major brands like Apple and Google have announced that in the coming years their operating systems will either not use third-party cookies or allow users to opt out of having their data used by third parties. The cloud will still be a valuable tool moving forward to continue to gather insights about people by leveraging many different strategies and tools, and the best part is, people’s privacy will not be sacrificed.
The worlds of martech and adtech are converging. Martech is the discipline of driving general brand awareness, while adtech is the discipline of interacting directly with a person to create a specific transaction. By capturing the data from these two worlds and combining them, brands are able to use insights in real time to achieve the ultimate goal: delivering more meaningful experiences for people.
Want to learn more? Visit Acxiom’s Intelligence Hub to see how it can help you gain valuable insights.
Want to listen to the podcast episode on this topic? Click here or follow the Acxiom Real Identity podcast on your favorite player.
