Marketing departments should consider hiring their own COOs to oversee data management due to the exponential increase in information available to marketers and the regulation of data collection and use, said Bruce Biegel, managing director of the Winterberry Group.
The enormous amount of data available to companies contains “a lot of dollars,” but marketers’ challenge is channeling that information into revenue, Biegel said during the April 7 keynote address at the NexTargeting Summit 2011 in New York.
He added that regulatory concerns, “organizational inertia” and the “tug of war for control” make companies hesitant about integrating their data to make it more accessible.
Biegel suggested companies appoint someone “to be responsible inside the marketing organization for the data, so [that person] can manage it” in a regulatory environment that forces marketers to differentiate between personally identifiable information and other types of data. He said the position would also “consistently monitor customer preference and media shifts.”
Such data management would help to create a marketing system that would deliver a personalized, real-time experience to consumers, said Biegel.
He defined real-time marketing “as a system that can support the execution of marketing intent under time constraints.” He added that it can also function without human intervention and interact across devices and media channels “nearly instantaneously.”
However, Biegel said he expects the implementation of real-time marketing to “take three to five years for most marketers” because of the required changes to company culture.
