According to the Data Age 2025 white paper by IDC, the collective sum of the world’s data will grow from 33 zettabytes this year to a 175ZB by 2025, for a compounded annual growth rate of 61 percent.
What’s a zettabyte you ask? Well, it’s really a lot.
With advertisers, agencies, and consultancies pushing for greater digital transformation, omnichannel activation and using customer lifetime value (CLV) as a metric for success, they’re all about the data.
However, the first barrier to overcome is data transformation – which boils down to figuring out what to do with even a minuscule slice of all those zettabytes.
Criteo (2018). The state of Customer Lifetime Value report.
Based on interviews with key executives in the region and in analyzing research reports, it is clear that advertisers use varying legacy systems from different vendors across their sales, marketing, after-sales service, IT, and human resource departments.
As a result, executives are left frustrated and faced with the reality that not only are they incapable of achieving data integration, they also have to face the consequences of failing to invest in data cleaning capabilities. This stems from the inability to afford programs that can monitor CLV and lacking the in-house skills to understand data.
Criteo (2018). The state of Customer Lifetime Value report.
Branding In Asia believes this will be the main focus of attention in 2019, with the understanding that in order to transform a business or a function, enterprises must able to link legacy, cloud, mobile, and IoT applications in either the cloud, on the premise of the hybrid model.
This then will change the means by which companies acquire, collect, clean, store, pull, and analyze data will the first step in achieving a single view of the customer and integrated workflows. The most sophisticated brand marketers will work with lookalike category owners to pool anonymized data assets and achieve incremental value in CLV analysis, potentially preventing future waste of acquisition budgets.
Criteo (2018). The state of Customer Lifetime Value report.
“Next year, we expect enterprises to double down on interconnecting data depositories and applications using open APIs based on industry standards like REST and SOAP, as well as low-code integration tools and APIs that can connect through standard data protocols like OData, enabling data to truly become the primary source of nutrition for digital business,” said Rob Newell, VP of solutions engineering, Asia-Pacific at Salesforce.
“In 2019, disparate datasets must be brought together as the fuel for AI to understand the end-user, whether it is a company’s employee or customer, and to trigger the right interaction at the right time.”
Additional perspectives from industry leaders:
Zachary King
VP of Commercial, Asia
MediaMath
In collecting consumer data, brands also need to focus on building accurate, compliant datasets that enable a more transparent relationship with consumers. Recognizing users regardless of device, and via an open, privacy-compliant identity solution, is the key to improved personalization and meaningful marketing experiences.
Alban Villani
MD of SEA, Hong Kong and Taiwan
Criteo
Expect retail stores to utilize supply chain data collection tools to complement online sales data to drive brand recognition and encourage customer loyalty. AI will touch every aspect of the customer journey and bring about a new wave of business efficiency.
Yuval Ben-Itzhak
CEO
Socialbakers
If you want to successfully leverage digital platforms like Facebook and Instagram for your marketing efforts, you need solid data to drive your decision making. In 2019, good data will still be imperative to help you know precisely where to invest your advertising budget in order to maximize reach, engagement and business impact.
Rick Jackson
CMO
Qlik
I think the single biggest thing that’s happening in our industry is around the inclusion of more artificial intelligence into the analytics engine. We refer to it as augmented intelligence, [which is about] how do we make humans better by taking advantage of what humans are great at and what machine are great at, one plus one equals three.
Charanjit Singh
Managing Partner
Construct Digital
In 2019, we expect to see the convergence of [data driven marketing and storytelling] – where data informs brands about the kind of stories they should be telling – to whom, and when to tell them most effectively. Brands will be more cognizant of this and expect their agencies to present this convergence well.
