Tug Life II, Day 2: ‘A flood of data and a fickle market – insights and challenges of modern consumers’
Real-time data is delivering unprecedented insights into our retail journeys, personalities and shopping habits – even if only to confirm that marketing is more challenging than ever.
On day two of the Tug Life II expo, Jim Hodgkins of creative targeting specialist VisualDNA proposed that online advertising “needs to progress from a scream to a smile”, using smarter psychological and personality-driven profiling and matching creative to appropriate individuals.
“Generally, we find the best psychological trait outperforms the best demographic by a long way,” said Hodgkins. “If you just use different language, different copy and different images that appeal to someone without getting in their face about what you know about them, you can persuade them a lot more effectively,” said Hodgkins.
Google’s Stephanie Jarzemsky described how the search giant is aiming to help marketers find traction in the midst of our fragmented mobile media habits by focusing on users and insights rather than data and devices.
“You have micro-moments that are lasting a minute and ten seconds, dozens and dozens of times a day,” she said. “So if you are not there in those short snippets, you are going to miss out on modern audiences.” She suggested Google’s Analytics 360 Suite, which offers personalised ads, customised landing pages and cross-media analytics.
Conrad Poulson of mobile data analytics company Huq lifted the lid on the marketplace for real-time mobile insights, especially in relation to our retail journeys.
“This device that we are carrying around now is effectively a remote-control for the world,” said Poulson. “If you look at how that behaviour stitches together, we get these journeys of connectivity where users are connecting to places and
93% of retail decisions are made in the physical world, he said, though remarkably, the most common application of much of Huq’s data isn’t advertising, but the City.
“Most of our money is made in financial services,” said Poulson. “We sell our data into organisations like hedge funds who make trading decisions ahead of market data.”
Tugce Bulut of StreetBees introduced the company’s smartphone-based real-time field information, which proposes to give brands eyes and ears on the ground with its network of smartphone-enabled ordinary people around the world.
But for all the data now available, the recession has created a brand of thrifty, pitilessly disloyal consumers that shows no sign of disappearing, warned customer experience expert Oke Eleazu. “Consumers are now agile and fickle,” he said. “That has a huge impact on brands. You can destroy a brand quickly and you can build one.”
Data is important, but only if you can extract clear-sighted insights, he suggested. “Data is great and it helps you listen, but fundamentally, the key thing is to understand,” said Eleazu, who insisted the best businesses are the ones with a ruthlessly clear understanding of exactly what their customers come to them for.
“It’s about selling the problem you’re solving, not the product,” he said. “What is it you are trying to solve for customers? You need to sell them that – not the product anymore.”
Tug Life II continues today and tomorrow – stay tuned for more updates coming soon!
