One core basic that I call “context” provides the needed focus. Context enables a strategic view that is necessary for effectively and efficiently planning, executing, reporting, and then acting — in other words, for charting the shortest distance from data to insights.

But first a little context on context and insights. Recent surveys of CMOs and other C-Suite executives continue to emphasize the top priority placed on gleaning actionable customer insights (e.g. McKinsey & Company’s “Minding Your Digital Business” report from May 2012).

Additionally, most marketers report their corporate management is now more likely to invest in the necessary technology and data assets to obtain deeper insights into consumers’ attributes, behaviors, mindsets, etc. to enhance the performance of their marketing programs, according to a CMO Council report.

Research Must Inform Go-to-Market Decisions

These corporate and marketing executives are seeking actionable insights that provide material business value by informing many of the following key go-to-market decisions, among others:

• Target Audiences – What target audiences provide the best opportunities for my brands?
• Brand Positioning – What point of differentiation offers the most appealing and viable positioning?
• Creative Expression – Which creative expression has the best strategic fit and is the most compelling?
• Media – What media or mix will be most effective and efficient in reaching and engaging?
• Campaign Performance – How are my campaigns performing and which metrics should be optimized?

To many readers, I am sure this all seems quite sensible and elementary. However, I continue to see reports (and have clients who mention reviewing reports) that deliver lots of data but no real insights, especially actionable insights that provide material business value by informing many of the above-mentioned go-to-market decisions.

Collectively these reports appear to lack the focus that context can provide, from planning to analysis to reporting, or from data to insights to actionable recommendations.

Use Context To Focus Your Efforts

If we look at the very definitions of the term “insights,” either based on logical thought or intuitive processes, they emphasize the importance of context and focus. Here are just a few examples:

• Understanding a specific cause and effect within a given context
• Identification of relationships and behavior within a model, context, or scenario
• Selective encoding, selective combination, and selective comparison
• Gestalt — seeing the bigger, coherent picture of a problem
• Hypothesis — linking data which had previously seemed unrelated
• Insights are derivations of rules — mind models for predicting outcomes

Among these, hypothesis testing provides a special context or conceptual framework for focusing our measures and assessing the probability of our observations. It lets us reject the improbable null hypothesis (e.g. no difference…or not causal) and accept the alternative hypothesis (e.g. different, greater or casual in proper experimental designs).

In this regard, insights are most effective when they either confirm or directly challenge your mind models, and, in turn, create disequilibrium and motivate decisions and course corrections. Clearly we need insights to deliver real value to prospects and clients.

Starting With the Client Context

Ideally, all marketing research and analytic initiatives should start with a solid “client” context, which should provide the conceptual framework and focus for informing our planning, executing, and reporting — including the clarity of our recommendations based on actionable insights of material value.

Again, this is quite sensible and elementary, but I continue to be amazed by reports and presentations that do not provide or repurpose this client context in terms of a brand or campaign brief.  The frequent consequence is that the analytics plans, reports, and discussions are inefficiently voluminous and circular, and ineffective in informing specific client decisions.

These client, brand and campaign briefs do not need to be lengthy. In fact, they should be brief yet provide the necessary conceptual framework to guide our research and analytics value chain. These briefs should provide a short summary sentence or two on each of the following, among others:

• Purpose or Objectives
  • Brand building, performance or both?
  • Specific decisions the client is making in light of the research or campaign analysis
  • What information or metric do they believe would be most useful for informing their decisions?
  • Prior benchmarks and distributions
• Marketing Strategy
  • Market structure, especially in terms of competitive set, relative positions and target segments
  • Target segment definitions and category appeal, purchase cycle, etc.
  • Brand positioning, appeal, equity or challenges
• Media Strategy
  • What media or mix will be used to reach and engage?
  • Weight and results in prior campaigns
  • Single channel or multi-channel attribution
  • Targeting criteria
  • Timing & Geography
  • Buying method
  • Budget
• Creative Strategy
  • How does the creative express the brand strategy?
  • Different versions for different segments?
  • Are their calls-to-action?  Offers?
• Campaign Performance
  • What is key objective and key metric?
  • Performance standard, baseline, or “allowable” cost (engagement, lead, customer, etc.)

This type of information contained in a short client, brand or campaign brief will, as mentioned, provide the researcher or analyst the conceptual framework for efficiently designing, executing, reporting and making clear recommendations. This approach will naturally lead to the data case, including visualizations and relevant insights, that supports clear action-based decisions with material business value.

Effectively Putting Data Into Context

Further, within the report or presentation, It is highly desirable to put the data within context, which helps to reveal both relative efficiencies or response likelihoods, as well as relative size or materiality.  For example, Chart 1 below shows an audience and responder profile based on Mosaic Social Group segments for a recent display campaign. Percents and index values are displayed for both audience impressions and click-through responses.

Chart 1: Audience & Response Profiles

Both Percentages And Index Values Provide Necessary Information

For the audience analysis, the percentages, of course, represent the relative number of impressions across these segments, while the index values reveal the relative efficiency of the media buy in targeting these segments (Where audience segment index value = % Impressions/% US Adult  (18+ years) Population X 100; 100 represents random/untargeted…and 200 represents 2X media efficiency).   Thus the audience index values provide context for the percentages by revealing the relative efficiency of the media buy in targeting specific segments.

Similarly, for the responder profiling analysis, the percentages, of course, represent the relative number of responses across these segments, while the index values reveal the relative likelihood to respond, given the opportunity to respond.

In this case, the segment response index values are derived by indexing against the impression audience (where response segment index value = % responses/% impressions X 100; 100 represents average response likelihood…and 200 represents twice as likely to respond).  Thus the response index values complement the segment response percents by providing the context for determining the relative likelihood of consumers in each segment to respond, given the relative opportunity to respond.

Collectively, these audience and response profiles, shown with percentages with index values, provide data and visual context, to easily make and communicate very specific media recommendations, such as:

• Reinforce – American Diversity & Varying Lifestyles
• Increase – Upscale America, Affluent Suburbia & Aspiring Contemporaries
• Reduce – Small-Town Contentment, Metro Fringe & perhaps Urban Essence

This same set of audience and response profiles can also be visualized into insights quadrants (Chart 2) to further reveal and enhance communications about both relative efficiencies and relative likelihoods, as well as target discovery, and, in turn, how to best revise the media targeting and buy to enhance both media efficiency and consumer engagement.

Chart 2: Audience & Response Insight Quadrant

These are just two examples of reporting data within context, which aids in telling the full story.  It’s important to remember that percentages by themselves convey relative amount, but do not speak to the relative efficiencies or relative likelihoods. Meanwhile, index values by themselves convey these relative efficiencies or likelihoods, but do not reveal materiality, importance or size of the opportunity.

My humble goal for this article is to speak to the value of context — client context and data context — for charting the shortest distance from data to actionable insights or material business value.  I aim to do my small part to reduce the likelihood that readers will review reports or view presentations that fail to produce meaningful results.

Today, we move past the problem and focus in on the “how” — how to bridge that divide and reshape the current digital landscape. First, a short recap of the core problem as revealed in the recently completed study, “Bridging the Digital Divide.”

Across all groups of senior executives (i.e. Marketers, Agencies & Publishers), the multi-channel approach to digital marketing is what best defines most firms’ current digital marketing capabilities, which is the lowest of the three progressively more challenging broad execution capabilities presented in our assessment framework:

• Multi-channel: Executing campaigns in two or more channels
• Cross-channel: Applying lessons from one to other channels
• Real-time Interactive Marketing: Executing real-time dynamic interactions across channels and programs

While marketers’ goals are largely aimed at reaching and engaging the right consumer, at the right time in the right context, their efforts are largely currently focused on executing across a plethora of point-solutions and siloed channel-centric teams.

Managing Point Solutions Creates Complexity

Managing all these various point-solutions and siloed teams is creating overwhelming complexity, which is a key challenge to digital marketing effectiveness. It’s also clearly creating siloed seas of data that often fail to provide unified consumer views or actionable insights.

Marketers are literally  being robbed of their “bandwidths” and drowning in disparate seas of data, which is, in turn, negatively impacting performance in a number of fundamental marketing areas, not the least of which is gleaning and maintaining a solid “outside-in” consumer-perspective.

 “We need customer-focused, integrated media mix plans.” – Marketing Executive

“It’s about user focus, not data focus.” – Marketing Executive

Evolutionary Forces: Reshaping The Digital Landscape

The research, “Bridging the Digital Divide,” revealed two underlying factors that largely account for how senior executives assess their firms’ digital marketing effectiveness (Chart 1), namely:

•  Real-time intelligence: The ability to apply real-time intelligence of “digital interactions” to enhance relevance and performance.

•  Unified automation: The ability to seamlessly execute with unified customer views, and attribute results across channels and programs.

Chart 1

Further, our gap analysis revealed the following specific capabilities that most differentiate those characterizing their firms as primarily multi-channel digital marketers versus those who believe that they are effectively executing at the level of real-time interactive marketing (Chart 2):

•  Real-time measurement and optimization and dynamically serving ads and content are two specific capabilities related to the real-time intelligence factor.

•  A unified customer view is a key component for unified automation.

“We need a unified view with real-time optimization and real-time buying models.” – Agency Executive

Chart 2

These two factors appear to be core enabling capabilities necessary for “customized” real-time interactive marketing, and for evolving from a “push-marketing” campaign mindset to 360-degree customer strategy based on connected interactive experiences.

Meeting The Escalating “Relevance Mark”

As such, real-time intelligence and unified automation are two evolutionary forces that, in union, provide the basis to enhance digital marketing execution by enabling real-time interactive marketing, which, in turn, will help bridge the current digital divide. These two forces will help our industry meet the escalating “relevance mark” set by their digitally-empowered consumers, and evolve from channel-data specialists to consumer-engagement specialists.

Finally, we believe these two forces are reshaping the digital landscape and, over time, will enable the industry to consolidate around “smart” end-to-end solutions that provide sell-side and demand-side value.

This will help us evolve towards more real-time adaptive markets, with real-time relevancy, audience-buying efficiencies and transparency, as well as “fair value” discovery – where publishers apply real-time audience intelligence to avoid commodity pricing even with RTB media buying, and marketers and their agencies will have the transparency required for differential bidding.

The “Bridging the Digital Divide” study presents an analysis of the input provided from close to 400 senior executives from February 20-March 11, 2012, and is a result of collaboration between PulsePoint, a global digital media technology company; The CMO Club, a CMO peer-to-peer network with over 800 members; and Digiday, a publisher with survey access to more than 22,000 publishing and agency decision makers. Download the full research results here.

And for all the “big data” our industry analyzes on a daily basis, one would think that we’ve gotten pretty good at measuring, listening and responding to these changes in behavior and preference.

In this measurement-obsessed industry, we are also constantly evolving and measuring ourselves. Data is everywhere…And yet, amongst all our daily labors, we have to question whether our firms are evolving or “connecting the dots” quickly enough to meet the escalating “relevance mark” set by consumers.

A Massive Digital Divide Between Consumers & Marketers

On this point, results from just-completed research makes it abundantly clear that there is currently a massive “digital divide” between consumers engaging in real-time across channels, versus the digital marketing industry that is still largely siloed and not executing in real-time.

This landmark study, Bridging the Digital Divide, employed a three-tiered digital marketing framework designed to assess and benchmark current execution capabilities, as well as key challenges and priorities of senior decision makers at brand, agency and publishing firms.

The study presents an analysis of the input provided from close to 400 senior executives from February 20-March 11, 2012, and is a result of collaboration between PulsePoint, a global digital media technology company, The CMO Club, a CMO peer-to-peer network with over 800 members, and Digiday, a leading publisher with survey access to more than 22,000 publishing and agency decision makers.

Most Are Only Multi-Channel

Specifically, across all groups, the multi-channel approach to digital marketing is what best defines most firms’ current digital marketing capabilities (see chart 1), which is the lowest of the three progressively more challenging capabilities presented:

• Multi-channel: Executing campaigns in two or more channels
• Cross-channel: Applying lessons from one to other channels
• Real-time Interactive Marketing: Executing real-time dynamic interactions across channels and programs

Further, it appears that this digital divide is due, in large part, to two key challenges observed in this research, namely:

• Overwhelming complexity due to the plethora of “point solutions,” and
• A lack of unified measurement.

The rest of this article will focus on the latter challenge and implications.

In Search Of Unified Measurement

Unified measurement is perceived as critical to advancing from multi-channel to cross-channel marketing, enabling the tracking of consumer journeys, proper attribution, and connected customer experiences. In this regard, the top five priorities given by marketers for improving their digital marketing capabilities deal with measurement issues.

Delving deeper reveals that unified measurement, in turn, largely consists of the following two related measurement domains, namely:

• The Need for Unified Audience Views – Unified measurement to “connect the dots” and enable the measurement of audiences for content, no matter where that content is being consumed, would benefit both publishers who wish to “fully and fairly” monetize their content, as well as marketers and their agencies who wish to engage and validate targeted consumers at scale. Expanding the measurement framework to include assessments of total reach and the impact across paid, owned and earned media is also important to improving digital marketing practices.

• Full-Funnel Thinking – Marketers need to plan, execute and measure from the perspective of targeting and tracking consumers throughout the funnel, which includes measuring and attributing results beyond the “last click.” This mind-set enables a broader, longer-term view of digital marketing programs, targeting methods, and brand engagements.

Finally, as an industry, we need to move from the current plethora of point solutions that, however effective in the short term, only add to the complexity and data overload that most digital marketing professionals are already feeling.

Get Back To The Consumers

It’s time to get back to the core of all this measurement — the consumers — and employ smart end-to-end solutions that provide value to both the buy and sell sides and enable real-time efficiencies.

This also means evolving from channel-data specialists to consumer-engagement specialists, informed with unified consumer views and employing relevant contact strategies based on connected interactive experiences.

My next article will focus on two key enablers that, in union, provide the basis to enhance digital marketing execution. We believe these two forces are reshaping the digital landscape and, over time, will enable the industry to consolidate and evolve towards more real-time adaptive markets — with real-time efficiencies and fair value discovery.

 Want to know how your priorities stack up? Download the full research results here.