EMEA > Data

If personalisation works so well – why don’t more brands use it effectively?

Personalisation is hot property in digital marketing at the moment. The ability to present users with more relevant experiences in the purchase cycle resonates with advertisers and brands alike. Increasingly competitive landscapes mean it is more important now than ever to get the right message to the right person at the right time.

Despite the apparent opportunity it seems many brands fail to deliver meaningful personalised experiences for their customers. Let’s take Amazon for example; I’ve been shopping with them now for over 14 nears, from which they must have a wealth of purchase data to work with. Last week I bought a pack of Oral B Tooth Brush heads and some tumbler glassware. This week’s personalised email suggested I purchase an Oral B toothbrush and some more tumblers despite common sense dictating I owned both of these products already.

So where are companies going wrong? What is the real opportunity? I spoke with three of the leading technology providers in the personalisation space to learn more about the challenges and opportunities faced by digital marketers looking to succeed with personalisation.

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The Rubicon Project recently released some localised data in its Nordic RTB Market Growth blog post. At ATS Stockholm last May, ExchangeWire saw a fairly nascent market still testing and probing the potential of impression-level buying. Rubicon’s report on the Nordics seems to indicate a big adoption of RTB-based buying (see graphs below).

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Nick Stringer is Director of Regulatory Affairs at IAB UK. Here he addresses the European Commission’s draft data protection proposals: what you need to know — and do.

In a rapidly evolving sector, such as digital marketing, there will always be challenges from legislators as they seek to ensure consumer safeguards keep pace with technological innovation. Collectively, it is our job to inform them that this needs to be balanced without throttling innovation and the commercial models that underpin the internet. Self-regulation – where privacy-enhancing approaches are built into product cycles – has a very important role to play, as it can move faster with markets than a statutory approach.

The approach by Brussels

However, a year ago in January 2012, the European Commission proposed changes to the way personal data is protected and regulated across EU markets. The proposals were driven by a need to update the law in light of technological changes since 1995 (when the current law was framed in Europe – the 1998 Data Protection Act in the UK) as well as to streamline the rules to make it easier and more efficient – particularly in a digital world – for businesses operating across territories, hopefully saving millions of pounds in administrative burdens. Above all, the proposals were aimed at providing European citizens with a strong level of data protection and accountability, fostering a new climate of trust in the services we all use.

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Robert Jackson is Managing Director at elisaDBI.

2013 has the potential to become the first year that data-driven business will be considered mainstream. Love it or hate it, the hype around Big Data has helped raise awareness of the benefits a data-driven culture can create. The fact is, organisations who adopt it are growing faster, making more profit and being more efficient.

Having worked in web analytics for over seven years now, I’m well acquainted with the pursuit of data-driven business. The removal of intuition in decision making has long been a Shangri La for business owners, managers and marketers alike. As digital marketing began to explode at the beginning of the last decade, there were many who believed that faith-based marketing would disappear. In reality, most companies still have guesswork at the heart of managing huge budgets and important decisions.

December saw the launch of a report by the lottery-backed charity NESTA into the use of data in British business. The first of its kind in Britain, it found that just 18% of the 500 companies surveyed are making effective use of the data they collect. Furthermore, these ‘Datavores’, as the report calls them, are out-manouvering their competitors with sophisticated collection and analysis techniques. These practices are leading to both increased innovation and growth.

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In the 1990s, a typical database consisted of just a couple of megabytes. By 2000 this had significantly increased, and one decade later we’re now storing petabytes of data. What caused this rapid growth and which types of software can help us manage these mountains of data?

The rapid growth of disk space
When I first started developing websites, a typical hosting package had only 25 megabytes of storage. Of course that was intended for personal websites – not large enterprises – but things changed quickly in a very short span of time.

Today, you can store several gigabytes for less than what it used to cost for a few megabytes. This is thanks to advances in technology, stiff competition and most importantly, cheap disks with multiple terabytes of storage. The going rate is now only about 0.05 USD per gigabyte.

The trend of rapidly increasing space and decreasing prices caused people to store more and more data. People tend to be lazy – why bother deleting something if you can just leave it there? You can compare a hard disk to your attic or basement – as long as there is space available, you’ll just keep filling it up with stuff!

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It’s a fact of life that data on the continent doesn’t come in the same convenient packets that it does in the US and UK. The big data providers that we use every day in the UK, such as BlueKai and eXelate, have a lesser presence across the EMEA region.

It’s not that data doesn’t exist in the region, of course it does. However, the data in these markets is often held by different companies, kept in other forms, or may need to be added to offline information to make it truly valuable.

The bottom line is that everyone collects data, but not everyone utilises it effectively, or even realises that information collected as part of their primary business activity might have value.

This means that companies like Videology need to take a more creative approach to sourcing the consumer data required to help our advertising clients reach their target audiences.

Essentially, in order to extract value for agencies, advertisers and publishers, we have identified four key ways of maximising data in EMEA:

First, we work with a variety of companies that collect opt-in consumer data in different ways. It may be data gathered as a byproduct of their business’ core function, or gathering insights that don’t come from conventional cookie-style tracking, but these can be incredibly rich sources of data.

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Most businesses now have a fairly good understanding of what their online media is doing to drive leads to their site, they have a good view of how their site is doing at converting those leads, and decent knowledge of how they are retaining the customers they’ve already won.

Obviously, this requires a vast amount of data to be collected, processed and analysed before any useful insights can be drawn that actually result in improvement and optimisation of web marketing, site design or customer retention strategies. Once the insights begin to be leveraged, though, the benefits can be huge. For a big online retailer, a difference in its site conversion rate of 0.1% can mean a difference of millions of pounds in its revenue.

So, apparently ‘Big Data’ is a big deal, but not for the reason that seems to be assumed. Rarely does looking at information in this way result in a wholesale change to the way a company does something. The reality is that through practice, and trial and error, companies had actually gotten pretty good at doing this stuff anyway.

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Mark Connolly is the newly appointed European Managing Director at AudienceScience. Here Mark talks about the issues and challenges currently facing the industry and the important role that technology will play in 2013.

I have been fortunate enough to have worked in the advertising space for 25 years and have experienced first-hand how audience data and programmatic buying technology have revolutionised the industry. I’ve also seen that, in my time, on both the buy side and sell side – for all the technological advancement – the industry still suffers from really expensive bad habits.

We have an ecosystem unsuited to do what’s best for the advertiser. Marketers pay for every layer of service and technology, including agencies, trading desks, vendors and publishers. Each player takes a cut from the marketer’s budget, creating a zero sum game. Worse, marketers pay for this with “percent of media” fee structures that encourage agencies and vendors to spend more, regardless of effectiveness, and avoid finding efficiencies for advertisers. Unsure of the right questions to ask, advertisers have entrusted budgets to agencies, with little or no visibility into how their budgets are actually allocated.

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