By Barbara Bacci Mirque
At the ANA I have the good fortune to see lots of data and hear from many different client side marketers. I personally have worked on five ANA marketing accountability surveys (and about to start the sixth one) and on our seminal MME 2010 cross industry study fielded in partnership with the AAAA, IAB and Booz & Co. Recently I was privy to a report from a recent digital study. The same issues keep surfacing: it is not just about measurement be it digital or analog-it is also about how data is collected and categorized in an organization and how internal silos are broken down. What digital has added into the discussion is the ability to measure more and more–some in minutia-and the need to wade through and discern what is relevant and what is not.
Today organizations can gather reams of data but if marketing needs are not considered the data will be difficult for marketers to utilize. Leveraging data is a key challenge faced by many organizations and marketing is sometimes left out of these discussions. Marketers must talk to Finance and to the Analytics staff and work as a team on this task to stop this cycle. There should be a centralized database which all users access and into which marketers input data from their powerpoint oriented marketing plans. It sounds simple but putting together such a database is an enormous undertaking. However, it should be a starting point that will reap many rewards, the least of which may be measuring the return on marketing investments.
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