‘An opportunity for proper innovation’: marketers on real-time, post-funnel data

Jonathan D’Souza-Rauto, biddable product lead, Kepler: “One of the more interesting solutions that I’m seeing in the market right now is the concept of a data cleanroom. They really try to tick the boxes of privacy and data ethics, being able to do things that a third-party cookie could never do before, but doing it in a compliant way. The IAB has now formally defined what a clean room is, earlier this year. There are going to be a lot more vendors in the space – both the walled gardens and neutrals – that are going to buy into data cleanroom solutions, which both an agency and an advertiser should be using.”

Jonathan Aina, head of MG platform, MG Empower: “Now, there are so many touch points. It’s no longer a funnel; it’s a graph. I’m looking forward to seeing how different solutions try to solve the problem of understanding where you need to position your content or your ad or your activation to get the result you're looking for.

“What’s interesting now in the social and influencer space is how we're leveraging social network analysis. Influencer marketing might seem to be going down, but when you look at the nano and micro space there's a lot of potential there. We did a pilot, and across all different modes of marketing, nano- and the micro-influencer marketing gave us five times better results than any other approach. That was with five different, real, brands.

“Now, what we’re trying to do is understand the butterfly effect: no longer looking at single influence, but at the influence of influence. With real-time insights, we’re not just running things and leaving reporting to the end; we’re seeing how it’s performing at every stage, and blending the different aspects together to get holistic results. We’re going to see a lot of solutions trying to do that in different ways.”

Giuseppe Licari, chief exec and co-founder, GreenJinn: “These are challenging times, with a lot of changes happening. We have to keep observing the market and see where there are data blind spots. From any challenge can come opportunity. If we’re able to make the cake of data bigger, it’s going to benefit businesses (and consumers, if it’s properly managed and the value is properly distributed). We need to do it seriously: the data needs to be solid and certifiable. There’s a real opportunity for providing some proper innovation in the market.”

Simon Spyer, chief exec of data driven futures, Iris: “There’s something coming around data sustainability, or data and sustainability. It’s probably about 10 years ago, somebody said that data is the new oil, in terms of fueling the economy and the explosion in data; how it’s come to be ubiquitous. But if you look at the energy consumption related to data and how that's exploding, it can’t be long before that starts to come under scrutiny.

“Companies will start thinking more about how it relates to their ESG strategies. It will be incumbent on us as practitioners to think about data efficiency and only holding data for the right purposes (purposes that we’ve got explicit permission for) and thinking about how we minimize data. It’s not something that has seen major traction yet, but it is coming and we need to start thinking about it.”

To read more from The Drum’s latest Deep Dive, where we’ll be demystifying data & privacy for marketers in 2023, head over to our special hub.