Is the data profession reaching maturity?
People working in data all over the world are talking about the deprecation of third-party cookies. But cookies aren’t the only macro trend shifting the horizon of data work – far from it. Along with US reporter Kendra Clark, we sat down with data experts from The Drum Network to look at the factors shaping the future of data, from dashboards to GDPR, and the evolving role of data in assessing marketing itself.
Data experts from The Drum Network on their maturing industry / Dennis Kummer via Unsplash
Sitting down with data experts from across agencyland, one word keeps coming up: ‘maturity.’ Headlines about the death of the third-party cookie may convey panic, but the impression our panel of experts gives is of an industry coming to understand itself better than before, thanks to maturing data sets, deeper understanding about what they can achieve and an improving harmony between what users want and what data-backed platforms and advertisers can give them.
The data on marketing effectiveness
For Daniel Smulevich, vice-president of analytics at Jellyfish, the biggest thing data can offer marketers is steering them away from work that doesn’t really matter. For a long time, he says, even data professionals have relied on a narrow view of effectiveness, provided by publishing platforms.
“Suddenly in the last couple of years we’re really using data to see what actually worked rather than hearing from Facebook, Google and so on,” he says. This allows better decision-making based on a scientific understanding of results, rather than inherited understandings of ‘best practice’; in this sense, “the use of data in the world of marketing analytics isn’t something I saw a couple of years ago.” Here he points to expanding industry resources, such as the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s databank on effectiveness in advertising.
For Mark Walker, head of data and insight at Keko, this follows a new appetite for genuinely data-backed insight at clients’ highest organizational levels. “Five years ago, having a client [who] actually want to see a dashboard – to engage in actual, real, live data – would have been an impossibility. The board room didn’t care. The C-suite weren’t interested in seeing those kinds of granular results.”
Data expertise won’t always be high for execs – requiring careful explanation about what exactly data means and what it doesn’t – but that appetite is itself valuable. “We’re no longer deciding whether a campaign was successful by gut feel," says Walker, "we’re actually seeing it by the impact it had.” Thus, data experts are able to get closer to an old dream: replacing ambiguity and guesswork with facts and understanding.
Dashboard confessionals
The output of a certain kind of data work have often been dashboards: interactive platforms to give teams data snapshots. The continued role of dashboards is contentious among our experts: for Smulevich, a shift toward real-time data threatens to make dashboards obsolete by being simply “too late.” Danny Bluestone, chief exec at Cyber-Duck, is measured here: “Dashboards are part of the solution – but they’re also part of the problem.” He predicts that dashboards will increasingly sit within a suite of outputs to describe “a whole journey explaining what users want.”
Walker agrees: dashboards continue to be valuable as “the entry point for changing the culture of our clients.” With data knowledge still growing at the C-suite, “the only way you can get them bought in is by giving them the tools and the access.”
More data doesn’t mean better data
With organizations of virtually every kind collecting vast amounts of data and hoping to use it to improve business results, a data expert’s role is increasingly to cut through the noise to find the signal. “One of the themes that we consistently hear from our clients is, ‘we have all this data, terabytes of data, but I still can’t answer my key business questions,’” says Lora Kaye, head of analytics at iCrossing. “When we do a data assessment, more often than not we find that our clients have a lot of data but it’s not necessarily the right data to get them where they need [to be].” That pushes data cleaning, standardization and analytics to the fore.
The danger, says Sian Miller, data strategy lead at Adapt, is “data blindness”: brands can “jump on board and think that measuring everything, collecting as much data as possible, is going to answer all their problems – but they don’t have the infrastructure, expertise or contacts in place to then ask that data the right questions and do the analysis on it and extract the insight.”
The upshot can be ‘analysis paralysis,’ but here again our experts give us reason to be hopeful: Aaron Dicks, performance director at Impression, reports that clients’ “appetite and aptitude for handling these data conversations [is] growing pretty exponentially.”
Brief responses
As data quantities proliferate and offerings mature, the key will be to ensure that teams are using the data to answer the right questions. “Where we’ve fallen short and we haven’t done ourselves a favor in the industry as a whole is domain knowledge,” says Smulevich. “Often we don’t push back on the brief to understand the underlying business or marketing objectives we can impact.”
The key is to understand first what you’re trying to impact, then gather the data necessary to understand the changes you need to make – by gathering data in the traditional sense, but also by studying financial statements, reading industry publications and looking to surveys and other sources (Bluestone adds that incorporating qualitative data can be key). Gathering information in this way might be a game changer in the truest sense. “Otherwise,” Smulevich says, “you just hear the story that platforms want to tell you.”