December Point of View: Why We Are About to Deliver the Holy Grail

I am extremely bullish that the direct marketing industry is upon the precipice of some truly “sonic boom” breakthroughs in innovation that will fundamentally change the way we select, promote, and measure 1:1 marketing programs.

For well over 5 years now, we have possessed the analytics and intuitive tools to create and execute individually personalized contact strategies for our customers, but there has existed one single limitation keeping these innovations from seeing the light of day, and keeping us in our spreadsheet-driven, file-passing entrapment. That one missing thing is the ability to assimilate, manage, and organize structured and unstructured data into a single, real time environment, thus allowing analytics to be applied across a common, yet media independent view.

Existing marketing databases were built to manage large amounts of STRUCTURED DATA. They were organized around customer records (a name and associated transactions as well as a few other unique descriptors about that customer). However, much of the client oriented data generated today is in the form of UNSTRUCTURED DATA, information about a customer’s purchase quest that is not tied to a specific customer or conforming to a consistent organizational pattern.

Integrating unstructured data into a managed data environment where repetitive formulas can be applied requires a uniformed data management platform that transforms, compiles, standardizes, and segments digital and traditional data elements to make them appropriately actionable in real time. New advancements in process controls, storage technologies, and transformation algorithms now allow us to manage high volumes of all types of data. The ability to hold “anonymous” data over time and convert it into a known customer when the identity becomes available allows us to look in arrears at all the promotion history and response behaviors, instantly providing more data power to the analytics.

The end result of a robust managed data environment of all customer values, promotional history through all media, response history, and anonymous response capture and convert will allow us in the very near future to predict the optimal contract pattern by media, sequence, and cadence for each unique individual in your customer universe.

In the words of Howard Schultz of Starbucks fame, “Expect more than others think possible.”

Very, very cool stuff ahead. Stay tuned—we are hard at work.