Ramsey Naja is chief creative officer at JWT MENA
“Data. Far beyond its digital origins, this word has come to define what we do today in our industry. Whether it is a matter for financial officers to wring their hands about and call for more of its capture, then instigate procedures and surveillance systems that make Big Brother look like a hippy, or for planners to collect enough of it to make pretty Excel diagrams, data simply rules the advertising world.
Indeed, it doesn’t stop at advertising, even though it affects it possibly more than any other industry. The big baseball clubs in America now make most of
their player acquisitions based on highly complex systems that analyse performances to such an acute and refined degree that their results are remarkably accurate and successful.
As we move further and further away from using subjective analysis and heartfelt hunches, or even pre-defined and measurable methods of propagating a message, and put our brands into the great unknown and hope it will stick, only a fresh-faced teenage Red Cross worker would possibly think that hard-nosed professionals would happily sit at marketing’s great roulette table and hope to hit the right number. And that’s where data has gradually taken over. You have to calculate the speed of the ball, the spinning rate, the expected friction and then factor in the fact that the croupier has been dumped by his girlfriend on his way to work. This, in fact, is practically the equivalent of the great data conundrum faced by marketers today, as we all switch from the comfortable predictability of paid media into a place where people, whose reliability is close to that of a Hollywood marriage, have become the media.
You see, from the humble number of “likes” on a Facebook page and all the way to the refined and sieved number of impressions and clicks and first-time visits and time-spent-on-the-site, we are slowly reaching the point where the mob rules. A mob that is, depending on where you stand in the big debate on privacy, either unruly or controllable digits.”