by Herman Manson (@marklives) Mad Men to Math Men is where advertising has been heading for a while now, and the pace of transformation is only picking up Steven Plimsoll (@splimsoll), Chief Technology Officer at the WPP Data Alliance and at Mindshare Worldwide, told delegates at the recently held Acceleration Digital Ignition Symposium.
In case you don’t know, the WPP Data Alliance is a partnership between WPP companies “to connect diverse data to provide powerful, analytics-driven solutions for our clients.” This is where direct marketing meets media, says Plimsoll, who argues that the traditional adoption model used by many marketers is broken as consumers adapt communication technology at an unprecedented pace.
WPP, with its keen eye on shifts in marketing spend, and backed up by the findings of a 2012 Gartner report that says by 2017 the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will spend more on IT than the CIO, is investing in building data partnerships, like the one recently announced with Twitter, and going into client data strategy.
For the WPP Data Alliance every consumer interaction, across the various channels they make use of, becomes an opportunity to collect data on consumers. “Insight opportunities” extend from store openings to tweets, call center activity, online ratings and reviews, media preferences and more. Data sources include traditional market research, owned activity monitoring (own website, call centre activity etc), social monitoring and media intelligence.