It sounds unreal to someone used to seven or eight selects on a list data card.
But did you know you can target hot prospects, using thousands of attributes, in milliseconds?
Welcome to the online data industry, and to a new targeting tool: Intent data. Three vendors talked it up this week during a session at Digital Marketing Days.
Media6Degrees (
http://media6degrees.com/) develops “custom audiences using brand loyalists and their strongest online connections,” its Web site says. It delivers ads “both inside and outside” of social media sites.
“Your brand’s best prospects are people most closely connected to its existing customers,” said Tom Philips, chief executive officer of Media6Degrees. His firm connects “browsers with browsers,” using countless streams of data.
x+1 (http://www.xplusone.com/) serves ads, landing pages and Web sites to people based on its algorithmic targeting platform. “We have an optimization engine that absorbs all that data from all of the different providers, and matches the right offers to the right people,” said CEO John Nardone.
BlueKai (http://www.bluekai.com/) has a liquid data exchange allowing marketers to find “valuable in-market shoppers across key verticals.” The market decides what data is worth. Among the participants are providers like Acxiom and Experian, according John Sedlak, vice president of global sales for BlueKai.
Philips derided the “blunt” targeting instruments used in the past. (Did he mean demographics, psychographics and RFM?) Bruce Biegel, managing director of Winterberry Group, argued that marketers have more choices and attributes than they’ve ever had.
The panelists added that marketers have taken months to build predictive models based on past behavior. “Search changed that,” Sedlak said. “People are raising their hands—you don’t have to predict what they want.”
Obstacles
That said, the panelists estimated that only $50 million is being spent per year on this type of digitally gathered data. But it could easily be “the next billion in data spend,” Sedlak added.
So what’s keeping even more companies from embracing it? Here’s our guess, based on remarks made at the session.
You Have to Be Big—Intent data apparently works best for big, CRM-savvy companies like auto manufacturers and financial services firms. It’s also popular in the consumer electronics, travel and telecommunications sectors.
Privacy—The panelists didn’t discuss this subject much because that would have taken up the whole session (or several sessions). But they see the dangers. It’s one thing for a cookie to tell you the sites served to a computer, it’s another to add personally identifiable information from offline sources. “We don’t use offline data,” Philips said.
Technical Requirements—For starters, you better have analytic competency. Outside companies can “help you with the infrastructure, but at the end of day you need analytic capability inhouse to draw right conclusions and drive programs,” Nardone said. Those most likely to have it? Companies experienced in direct mail. “Naïve clients are the worse clients,” Philips said.
Siloization—Many firms lack a common reporting path for marketing and analytics. The firms succeeding at this form of marketing “are the ones who have reorganized around customer segments or brought together various marketing silos into one integrated reporting structure,” Nardone said.
Creative Limits—Many firms lack the ability to differentiate offers and develop creative for all of the segments they see in the data. “That’s where they’re struggling,” Nardone said.
Sales Attribution—Some has to be credited and paid for the sale. But that’s no small challenge when multiple networks and vendors are involved. “It’s really tough getting attribution right,” said Philips. “We’re not pointing fingers, but the system has to mature.” Nardone added that “stealing attribution is a common term in our industry.”
Meanwhile, the competition is growing. But not to worry.
“There are more people at the table, but at least the turkey got bigger,” Sedlak said.
Ray Schultz is the former editorial director of the Chief Marketer Network.
