How Will Marketers Use Big Data in the Future?

With the advance of the Internet of Things and AI, the big data landscape for marketers is going to change. The IoT will be generating far more data than businesses are used to seeing. With that, marketing agencies and departments will need to decide which data they’ll use and which data is too sensitive to incorporate in campaigns.

In other words, as every aspect of our lives is increasingly converted into data, will anything be outside the scope of the marketing eye? And to what extent will marketers deliver messages through new, connected tech?

Digital marketing agencies are riding a wave of business trends directly related to big data:

• Businesses are spending less on internal operations because they’re spending more on marketing technology
• 83 percent of businesses expect to see the demand for marketing analytics grow alongside an increase in data collection      

In part, the increase in data collection stems from the number of connected devices contributing to the IoT. It also comes from the fact that businesses are seeing a ROI from data collection and analytics. In the past, it was fairly normal to doubt an increase in revenue and profits due to marketing personalization through data. Now, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind personalization is working.

If you’re a marketer (and even if not), no doubt you’ve seen it put this way before: customers want personalization. But it’s important not to go too far and not to be creepy. While 85 percent of people are influenced by personalized promotions on a website homepage, they may not want you to troll all of their Instagram photos in order to create promotions. Yet, that’s exactly what one marketing giant, Coca-Cola, did.

Coca-Cola targeted ads for Gold Peak tea to social media users through an image recognition software called Cluep. The engine shuffled through images available to the public on Facebook and Instagram. But are the people who post them aware they could be used for these purposes? For marketers, it’s a foregone conclusion that social media material will go towards marketing, but users aren’t quite as aware. It doesn’t seem to matter. According to Digiday, brands such as Nike, McDonald’s, and Toyota have also done visual targeting of this nature. What’s more, author Tanya Dua enthuses, people don’t seem to be creeped out. Brands that have run beta tests are seeing conversions and click-through rates of 5 to 10 times the industry benchmark on premium publishers.  

People don’t seem to be creeped out because they don’t know why, exactly, an ad for Gold Peak turned up on their favorite news site after they left Instagram. To the consumer, it’s just all part of the usual background noise on the internet.

Yet, when they’re confronted with the overarching issue of privacy, it turns out people aren’t necessarily happy with the situation. According to Marketing Week, 71 percent of consumers believe brands with access to their personal data are using it unethically. The figure comes from a survey of 34,000 people worldwide conducted by The University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre. 58 percent of the respondents said they haven’t used a digital service because of privacy concerns. But the same percentage of people would like to be automatically warned of unhealthy dietary habits, and 57 percent think data from smart refrigerators should be used to recommend groceries.

In the future, data from smart devices will yield all sorts of recommendations to consumers, recommendations for everything from groceries to health care products. Clearly, for a great many consumers there’s a disconnect between concept and practical usage. Although brands are using their data unethically, they should also be allowed to know the contents of their refrigerator for recommendation purposes. Recommendations of this sort are a hallmark of predictive marketing analytics. Brands will stand to profit from refrigerator recommendations. The same goes for any recommendations based on IoT data.

When the consumer feels these recommendations are useful, they like them. However, the concept of marketing teams plugging their purchasing habits, their location, and other intimate details into an analytics tool in order to create recommendations ”when you put it that way, plenty of people aren’t happy to think about a bunch of random strangers having access to their information. The unethical part comes from people feeling their data is being used to manipulate them.

78 percent of marketers say their organizations need to invest in analytics, and no doubt they feel this way because of the amount of data being created. IDC predicts the data output will be 180 zettabytes by 2025. This will translate into a $203 billion data market by 2020. To what extent ”and how ”marketers use this data will depend on organizational ethics and governmental regulations. The EU has passed a new privacy regulation, but there doesn’t appear to be anything like that forthcoming in America.

If you don’t want consumers to view your big data marketing practices as unethical, think about how the consumer feels and look at it from their perspective. People want transparency, and they don’t want to be targeted excessively. Tell them what you’d like to do with their data and ask their permission. The businesses who behave the most ethically with data and get the word out there about it will get press coverage and cheers from the public ”the type of publicity no money, and no data, can buy.