The New Gold Standard

Adweek published a wonderful article on how using data wil change the future of interactive marketing. Data analysis provides the ability to track level of interest as measured by actual behaviors online, and is the most powerful tool to date, for reaching those audiences that will be open and receptive to a given message.

“With Google’s pending acquisition of DoubleClick and Microsoft’s addition of aQuantive, two enormous data platforms are emerging. Meanwhile, agencies and clients are beginning to see this information as their most precious commodity, to be mined for targeting, analysis and, yes, even creative insights.” The New Gold Standard, Adweek 2/1/08

The back-story of the financial industry is illustrative of what is currently happening in the ad world. Before electronic trading was possible, the tools used for communicating left room for interpretation, in stark contrast to the present quantitative tools of measurement we can watch 24/7 on Bloomberg TV.

Similarly, the ad world has a need for measurable results, which has led to high demand of data tracking technology. The ability to follow interest is powerful, because it allows advertisers to predict what the audience is going to do before they deplete their resources (and there’s not as much room for interpretation as in focus groups of the past). In addition, determining how many people visit a web site has led to the development of tagging systems will help measure “audience segments” across sites.

With these new metrics taking hold there is an emerging sense of data overload throughout the ad world, while advertisers try to build their own “data warehouses”. It should be clarified that RAW data is not useful all alone, but PROCESSED data, like that generated by Spongecell, that provides useful information about audience interest.