The promise of digital marketing keeps crawling closer in tantalizing steps. The ability to market to individuals at scale still has obstacles, and the best of the current digital case studies tend to major in being one or the other – a truly personal idea delivered to a narrow audience or the mass delivery of a rich homogeneous idea. Nonetheless, problems that once seemed insurmountable in marrying the two together now seem merely expensive and difficult. The future is clear to even the least imaginative people in the field.
In that future, the winners will be those who can deliver on the oft-cited ideal of the “segment of one.” It doesn’t take the most brilliant of minds to understand that in a world of individualized marketing, the primary asset of a marketer will be individuals. As obvious as that sounds, it’s not the current state of affairs. Most marketers borrow or rent their individuals. Whether it’s the subsciptions of YouTube, the social graph of Facebook, or the databases of Acxiom, the asset of individuals is largely in the hands of others.
In some ways, this has been the premise of CRM systems for a while. But CRM has usually been restricted to current customers, loyalty programs, and first party data sources. As a result, these internal systems don’t describe three-dimensional individuals as much as shadows of them projected on a wall. The other panacea of punditry is to say this is all about Big Data. But that’s not really true. There’s a lot of noise in data. A good deal of what we generate is not meaningful. We may know people’s demographics and shopping history in great detail. Those may hint at their motivations. Yet knowing their actual interests is many times more useful to both the marketer and the marketed. Knowing where someone lives is far less important than knowing what they love. Any marketer of worth should be willing to trade every demographic detail they have on a potential customer – age, address, income, zip code, education, family status – for their music playlist. 3D Data shapes an individual in real dimensions.
The marketer who can connect first party information with the type of 3D Data that gives shape to a person can unlock value for both themselves and their customers. True individual data assets contain deep value for marketers to mine in the marketplace that’s fast arriving. It’s too valuable to cede to third parties. Prudent marketers will work to take ownership of that asset for themselves.
The Ryan Report 