Fixing Marketing's Identity Crisis

By Reclaiming Their Data Destiny and Adopting an Indentity-based Approach, Brands Can Regain Their Swagger.

- Steven Wolfe Pereira

It might be sunny in July, but winter is finally here. I’m not talking about the Season 7 premiere of HBO’s Game of Thrones (although I was one of the 16.1 million total viewers).

Winter is here for marketing.

The data points have been around us for a while. “Data is the new oil” was a headline story in the Economist in May 2017. Wall Street certainly thinks data is valuable and has been voting with its dollars, making Apple, Google (Alphabet), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook the top five most valued companies on the planet with a combined market capitalization of $3 trillion. Data is the “great game” now.

Naturally, marketers are worried. They fear they don’t have the data (or enough of it) that they need to compete. Lots of industry chatter is framed as “us versus them,” where marketers are pitted against the big five tech companies.

With so much focus on programmatic, myopic targeting and short-term goals, marketers have not reaped the true rewards of data driven marketing. Indeed, the ANA has highlighted the significant challenges facing the industry from driving growth and business performance to an unmanageably complex digital media supply chain to inadequate measurement and metrics.