If you are one of the under-informed about how the data revolution impacts on marketing, this book is for you.
The authors have simplified a complex subject and the result is very readable. The book is structured into questions, such as ‘who should we talk to?’, ‘what should we talk to them about?’ and ‘how do we find them?’.
There are also chapters on how much to spend on advertising and how to measure what works. Co-author Dimitri Maex shows how knowing the sales of existing customers can be used to estimate the total market spend of prospects and categorise them into high or low potential value. In an airline example, he describes how individual customer records could predict who are likely to defect and who to remain loyal.
A central theme of the book is that previously it was only possible to address groups of customers, but today the greater availability of data, sophisticated analysis techniques and the internet enable individual consumers to be targeted. In a very interesting media-buying section, the book describes how individual online ad targeting works. Via cookies, ad networks like Google and Yahoo track web surfers from site to site and assess each individual’s value to an advertiser.
We are told how a whole level of buying sophistication is added by advertising exchanges that provide a real-time auction environment, where the advertiser’s agents bid to expose their client’s ad to an individual consumer. Specialists estimate how much a competitor is willing to pay for that person, enabling the smallest price to be paid by bidding slightly more to secure them for the client. And all this happens in a fraction of a second.
However, there is growing evidence in non-marketing areas that big data is not as good as it’s cracked up to be, so although there is a lot of clever stuff in this book, I would have liked more proof that the algorithms deliver as claimed, particularly in less extreme situations than the examples given. Also, the book is written as if data miners can do the whole communications piece all by themselves. But the authors make it clear that the data-miners are not imbedded or fully accepted by the other agency functions that plan and implement communications.
A discussion of how these big data methods could be better integrated with other disciplines would have been very helpful.
This review was taken from the June 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.