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Why advertising industry is now embracing big data

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Big data can help make sense of the information gathered, such as retention cost, average transaction value and even customer satisfaction. FILE PHOTO | NMG

We continue to witness drops in advertising spends across the various traditional advertising platforms, radio, television and newspapers.

Whereas this could be attributed to political- economic reasons, there are also technological ramifications that are steadily chipping away the once fortified robust advertising industry. One such technology is big data analytics.

Traditional advertising once involved circulating ideas and pitches through various departments. Today, working with big data companies, advertisers can use these collaborations and partnerships to create original campaigns, and at a faster pace.

Not surprisingly, new companies that specialise in big data analytics have started to fill this void created by advertising agencies.

It’s perhaps for this reason that after several years of cautious enthusiasm, the marketing and advertising technology sector is now embracing big data in a big way.

Established brands are now in a position to invest in Data Analytics ecosystems that help them in leveraging the technological advances of consumer metrics in retrospect creating a disintermediation on the traditional advertising ecosystem that comprised the Advertiser, Broadcaster/ Publisher and Consumer.

Through these technologies, when rightly deployed, brands are able to effectively mine various consumer datasets and expose them to algorithms that match their brand attributes to effectively curate messaging and placement options that ensure low costs and effective reach.

For most traditional industries it’s a red herring, and for a variety of reasons. The biggest obstacle is that most companies and brands still lack the expertise necessary to analyse huge amounts of data and make it actionable.

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There are those companies that are somewhat not aware of these advances, there are the others that are aware but have not laid out a strategy towards adopting it and lastly there are these companies are collecting data they don’t yet know how to use.

Gaining insights into customer behavioural patterns plays a crucial role in creating focused and targeted campaigns.

Big data can help make sense of the information gathered, such as retention cost, average transaction value and even customer satisfaction. After all, consumers who spend the most money are not necessarily the most valuable.

Big data can be used to help create targeted and personalised campaigns that ultimately save money and increase efficiency by targeting the right people with the right product. How exactly? By gathering information and learning user behaviour.

A consumer’s digital footprint today is increasingly valuable in this personalised era of marketing and advertising. For instance checking a travel destination on google will lead a consumer’s social media and digital world to be flooded with ads about this phone.

These are the types of insights that can be gained from big data. For the marketing and advertising sector, this has meant more sophisticated analysis of things such as online activity, point-of-sale transactions and on-the-fly detection of dynamic changes in trends.

Big data will bring in an increasing number of new client side people. We thus need to see agencies starting to employ diverse analytic talents like actuaries, anthropologist, ethnographers and ethnographers to remain competitive.