Data Is Your Most Important Currency: Put It to Good Work

While many have sung the woes of new privacy regulations, this moment is arguably the best time to change the marketing industry for the better.

Now is perhaps the best time to be a marketer. Does anyone else agree? While so many in the industry have sung the woes of new privacy regulations and the earth-shattering (but, not really so earth-shattering) shift to a first-party data world, this moment is arguably the best time to change the marketing industry for the better.

We will, undoubtedly, face new challenges when it comes to data and privacy – and brands will need to stay aware of what updates, modifications or new policies there are to come. But, we’d rather focus on how to take advantage of these changes, which is exactly what we covered at the recent 2021 ATS London event.

Last month’s annual event focused on how businesses should embrace new data realities and enhance their own strategies, following these primary themes:

1. How the new value exchange will reshape the future of marketing and advertising.
2. The implications for buyers and sellers, both now and in the future. 
3. How privacy and identity will underpin the future of marketing and advertising.  
4. The new technology solutions being used and developed to solve these challenges and how they can be used.

Assembly's European Head of Consultancy, Femi Taiwo, spoke on this year’s ATS stage surrounding the topic of Data Management and Activation. Femi shared the stage with leaders from other noteworthy organizations, including ExchangeWire's Lindsay Rowntree, The Sun at News UK’s Paul Hood, Permutive’s Morika Georgieva and Zenith’s Alice Kamara.

Read on as we unpack some key moments from the discussion. And, you can check out the full recording of the session here.

Data Infrastructure – What does a coherent data infrastructure strategy look like? 

During this part of the discussion, we talked about the need for companies to develop cohorts from their CRM data and how to do so. We also focused on the recommendations we’re giving our own clients today:

1. Give honest recommendations – The last thing we want is for our clients to make decisions that only have a momentary gain but include larger legal costs much further down the line. Transparency is key here.
2. Invest in Proprietary Tools – Proprietary tools and technology are crucial to having a solid infrastructure. At Assembly, we focus our proprietary tech on enablement and keeping our clients safe on the data decisions they make. Going with your eyes wide open here as an overall strategy is essential. 

Data Deprecation – How are brands tackling this currently? 

Many brands have begun to develop their own first-party CRM data over the last 18 months, and similarly, CRM teams are now much more significant in the workplace than they were two years ago – a fantastic move forward for the industry.

The movement in this sector not only demonstrates how far Marketing has progressed, but it also demonstrates how businesses have had to change and respond to the new realities of working with customer and business data.

At Assembly, we currently advise clients to tackle data deprecation by using these solutions: 

1. Collect CRM data and take the headers within the data – Doing this will enable businesses to convert their data into cohorts. 
2. Reverse engineer the data into anonymous concepts - Eventually, businesses can build audience insights with publishers, and tailor their advertising strategies against those more specific concepts and cohorts. This is a great workaround as it takes away the need for businesses to have an ID match which isn’t scalable for present times. 
3. Cohort Migration Rate - The understanding of how long cohort migration rate should be is a concept that is still in its infancy industrywide. Using this as a test to then apply a time on specific cohort timings. 
4. Becoming your own first-party publisher – This should be a key area of focus for all brands particularly as companies are now being forced to identify ways in which to tailor their ads following the sets of data they have available.  

With all the decisions that brands must make about how they win through marketing, it will be critical for data literacy to be championed internally. This will ensure that appropriate business cases receive the attention they deserve to drive growth rather than data for data's sake, which often results in little change opportunities.