If your job involves marketing on the web, it’s likely that a significant chunk of your career will be spent piecing together data about your customers (and potential customers) likes, dislikes, interests and intentions. Buying email lists, coaxing contact information out of website visitors, reading cookies to understand browsing history – it’s all a complicated and broken game.
Because this data is broken up and spread across thousands of disconnected databases all across the web, getting the data is often a messy, expensive and inefficient process. For instance, Google owns my search history on Google. Bing owns my search history on Bing. Every website I’ve ever visited owns data on the pages I’ve visited there, and how I interact with their site. Every data source comes from a different intermediary, has its own conventions for how it can be used, and worst of all, none of these data sources can be reconciled with one another. Let’s face it – all marketers get right now is a fleeting glimpse at the audiences they are targeting on the web. This may be the norm, but the norm sucks.
There has to be a better way. We’ve seen some early efforts to marry up these different data sources – efforts that are still in their infancy, but often have stunningly positive results. So let’s take it a step further.
What if consumers themselves owned, controlled, and brokered their own complete datasets? It’s a valid question and an idea that isn’t all that far fetched. This New York Times article broaches the idea (and was the impetus for this post.)
Moral debates about ownership of data aside, a future where one unified database of marketing data exists (regardless of who owns it) could mean a huge leap forward for marketers. Rather than negotiate with hundreds of data providers for disconnected “tastes” of data on an anonymous user, why not negotiate directly with one source – the user – for data straight from the source? A platform that allows for this to happen could (if done right) represent a huge leap forward in efficiency, effectiveness, and even ethics.
Need an irony-laden example of how broken marketing on the web is today, and how something like this could fix it? Take a look at a screenshot of the New York Times article mentioned above. While reading, I was staring down a wall of retargeted ads for tires. Little does the New York Times know that I bought tires the day before, and that my attention has shifted elsewhere. It’s a missed opportunity to serve me relevant content, and it makes for a poor user experience. And think about it – these ads were served using what is commonly thought as a somewhat new and highly effective marketing tactic (ad retargeting/remarketing.)
Most users, if properly incentivized, would prefer to own and share their own data when it could prevent inefficiencies like this for sites they know and regularly patronize. It’s a fair trade that benefits everyone – users control their data, marketers get data that’s far and away better. Intermediaries lose, I guess.
It might not be long before marketers have to shift their attention from toiling with disconnected data sources to actually messaging real product benefits to seriously interested consumers. Isn’t that what marketing is really all about?
