Your Brand’s Next Breakout Moment Awaits In Creative Use Of Personal Data

If more CMOs are willing to embrace the marketing value of turning consumer data into compelling personalized experiences, we’ll be on the cusp of an exciting new “creative data” advertising genre.

As campaigns such as Netflix’s #Cokenomics show, we all love a quirky stat. Kooky info about where we are and what we love leaves us feeling simultaneously smart and entertained. But campaigns that use consumers’ personal data don’t always garner the same amount of respect. That’s because, thanks to a glut of annoying retargeting and hollow, data-led messaging, as soon as marketing and personal data are mentioned in the same breath, consumers start worrying they’ve got a new online stalker.

Perhaps this explains why a handful of forward-thinking CMOs are beginning to see beyond data’s sales and targeting potential to unleash more of its creative potential—a new mind set that saw 2016’s Christmas marketing reinvigorated with refreshingly original ideas:

• eBay’s “emotionally powered” pop-up analyzed consumers’ facial reactions to certain products to generate personalised reports of purchase suggestions.
• Samsung’s “World Choir” used the brand’s Gear S3 smartwatch to track singers’ biometric data, leveraging the results to create highly aesthetic data visualization displays.
• Uber’s “Year with Uber” rewarded customers with personalized data vsualizations that summarized their year’s riding pattern.

The common thread here is providing consumers with fun and valuable personalized content that doesn’t leave anyone feeling as if their privacy has been underhandedly invaded. By using data in this more entertaining and less obtrusive way, CMOs won’t provoke suspicion or backlash. Instead, these campaigns create breakout moments that foster a powerful emotional connection between consumer and brand.

If more CMOs are willing to embrace the marketing value of turning consumer data into compelling personalized experiences, we’ll be on the cusp of an exciting “creative data” advertising genre. And it’s something that could really take off during 2017. Why? Because innovation in different sectors has inadvertently laid all the groundwork.

As aptly demonstrated by Samsung’s “World Choir,” wearables are well-placed to scrape the quirky information about ourselves that we’re all so interested in. They’re a rich source of the type of fascinating personal data that can be transformed into captivating branded visualizations and experiences.

Similarly, as homes, cars, and cities become smarter and more connected through innovations such as the internet of things and AI-led personal assistants including Amazon’s Alexa, the pool of available data points will proliferate. This means the creative canvas for this new genre of advertising can only get bigger and better.

While points of data capture get more interesting and diverse, so, too, do the ways in which that data can be presented. The digital out of home (DOOH) sector, for example, is undergoing rapid innovation. A new breed of digital billboards can now host everything from motion sensors to geotargeting and real-time interactivity.

This means the display infrastructure for “creative data” advertising is becoming increasingly available and sophisticated. Looking even further forward, once we’ve cracked combining DOOH with creative data advertising, there’s potential to move into spaces with even more wow factor, such as LAX’s multimedia installation.

If CMOs are brave enough to take more of a creative, entertainment-led approach to data, rather than solely focusing on using data as a tactical sales tool, marketing will once again reignite consumers’ love for interesting data. If we start building more compelling experiences that celebrate, rather than exploit, consumers’ personal data, 2017 could well be the year we make data amazing again.

Data-driven marketing is going to be a big topic of discussion at Adobe Summit 2017, March 19-23. Click here to view the agenda and register. (Bonus: Enter code CMDC17 for an additional $200 discount.)