There is something particularly disconcerting about how quickly business is espousing the virtues (and returns) of “big data”, or more specifically, how hard data with its algorithm-based approach is being used to simulate, predict and trend human behaviour. Without allowances for context, or complimentary qualitative data, this rigid statistical approach to marketing and business development is a train wreck waiting to happen.
Not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, a big data approach – where everything is measured – is appropriate, but must for the sake of sanity and causal analysis, includes soft data sources like ethnography, cultural analytics and, anthropology.
In the field of marketing and media, where behaviours and consumer cultures are rapidly changing, these social sciences have an even greater role to play. The need for perspective in the context of media buying, consumer segmentation, customer communications and content development requires a ’softer’ side. On its own, a hard numbers game can’t deliver the insights to optimise current audience knowledge.
Values, life themes, brand communities (see Apple), even sub-cultures of consumption (see Harley Davidson), have as much legitimacy in audience selection and valuation as do TARPS, page views, CUME, frequency and unique users. Compounding the problem are antiquated segmentation processes based on socio-economic variables or postcodes which are increasingly seen as a blunt method of approaching the ‘mindset’ or culture of particular consumer groups.
Take for example a potential media buy with newspapers like The Australian or the Sydney Morning Herald. How many advertisers, let alone their agencies, would consider the paper’s respective tone, editorial line and general content priorities before executing a creative response? Is readership culture defined and quantified before or alongside readership and circulation? Not likely.
In 2009 a group of leading media and agency groups formed the “The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM)”. Members included the likes of Disney, News Corp, Starcom MediaVest Group, WPP, Time Warner and NBC Universal. The CIMM was an act of frustration at the lack of innovation in audience measurement, especially in digital media, and by extension, cross-media measurement.
There can be no greater example of innovation than a consistent approach to the ‘fusion’ of culture and value profiles with hard audience data.
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