Data Driven - how marketing teams can get safely into 2019

What does 2018 hold for marketers and communicators? We think we know: similar digital impositions that car manufacturers have known for years. Electric cars (built since 1890) and "ride-sharing companies" (Uber & Co), which have slipped to the digital level, destroyed the value chains and self-evident facts of an entire industry... and what did they think of? It internalized the thinking, technology and approach of the "disruptors", sent out small speedboats, invented new service models, also built platform monopolies and is now itself becoming the attacker of the attackers. Here.we.go!

The inhabitants of the somewhat too quiet island of "marketing and communications in large companies" must now embark on a similar journey. At the end of the road, the word "digital" will have disappeared from all department names. And what will then be as normal as driving assistance and route planners in cars today is "Predictive Driving in Communications and Marketing." It's all about data and the power of prediction. Hello "Data Driven Teams." Welcome back to the driver's seat!

 

Digital Media" Must Also Transform Digitally

Digital media has reached the end of the hype cycle, and the external trend radar has had its day. For communications and marketing, the internal digital transformation is now becoming decisive for competition. Whoever decides faster and implements better wins. This applies to computers just as much as it does to teams. But who has a strategy for the digital transformation of "Digita Media"? We are in a very exciting phase. Agencies are handing over their decisions to fully automated systems. Companies, in turn, have to build up data and decision-making authority in order to somehow stay in the driver's seat.

Digital efficiency is the way out

"Fast is better than perfect" - this general rule has an additional, existing meaning for digital communication: it is the way out of an otherwise unsolvable dilemma. The requirements, the target groups, the channels, the media and the content are exploding - but your own budgets are not. What can be done? Use data strategically and trigger an efficiency explosion.

Data DrivenTeams?

First of all: Data Driven Teams are formed around operational decisions only, not around organizational charts. In the future, such teams, which manage content, projects, and campaigns, will use assistance and forecasting systems to drive faster, better, and with less risk, just as drivers do today.

The systems make statements:
+ about the pressure with which content / topics have been communicated in the media (paid and owned reach)
+ about the resonance that content / topics have triggered in the target groups (engagement and conversion, share of earned reach)

When teams can simulate budgets and make predictive decisions based on such data, we observe leaps in speed and efficiency.

How to get there?

Out of the silos, into a new level of quality - to get there, you have to radically standardize and practice how to handle data, both technically, in the measurement and planning systems, and socially, in teams and people who make decisions.

If data are processed in the same way, they enable forecasts. If forecasts are used systematically, they trigger leaps in productivity and efficiency that are so significant that they profoundly, "disruptively" change entire technical and social systems.

The recipe for this path

1. On the one hand, radically standardized, channel-independent KPIs for media performance per content (similar to our Content.ONE system, which is also installed internally at companies).

2. On the other hand, individual team workflows that actually use data and forecasts for decision-making and continuous improvement (digital empowerment).

Data makes it possible to look into the future, and that is where its value lies.

It's fascinating what a jolt goes through teams and agencies when they can plan the impact of their communications in advance all at once. Until now, only media agencies were capable of such simulations. We are now embedding this knowledge in advertising companies.