Published on the 28/04/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Walt Disney’s Australian marketing team had just three and a half minutes of footage to leverage ahead of the Star Wars Force Awakens launch; it plugged the gap with data…
That data told it that young boys were far more engaged by Spiderman than Star Wars; that women were far less enamoured of the franchise than men; and that the original fans were always going to be fans – but would benefit from some love.
Gavin Ashcroft, chief marketing officer for Walt Disney Australia, and “brand guardian” for Star Wars in Australia, leveraged the data to create online and real-world campaigns to lure young boys to the franchise, win over the women, and keep the die-hard fans happy.
Record box office results suggest the approach worked.
Ashcroft was one of the keynote speakers at the Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising’s (ADMA) Data Day conference in Sydney, as was Evan Stubbs, chief innovation officer for SAS. Stubbs said that it was access to data rather than technology that was the really disruptive force in business.
But he warned that; “No one really knows how to adapt to this,” and that companies were going to have to move away from fixed structures and long term plans “to a world where things are changing on a monthly or weekly basis” based on what the data was telling them.
Such was the level of disruption promised by data that Stubbs forecast that autonomous cars would just be the harbinger of all things autonomous. He said that autonomous businesses, even autonomous cities, where sensor data was plugged into algorithms which could effect change, would begin to emerge.
Access to quantities of data plus the advent of blockchain based technologies which disintermediate trust will spawn new categories of business he said. “From an economic perspective it allows you to create truly autonomous organisations without human intervention – and the input to that is data.”
Better data insight is already being used to shape marketing and advertising campaigns, witness the Star Wars campaign. Another speaker at the conference, Graham Cook, group director digital operations, Thomas Cook Group, said that a better understanding of consumer data was allowing his company to build more responsive omni channel campaigns to support consumers making decisions about holidays and make decisions based on real time data rather than gut-feel.
Data insights about customers’ online behaviour also fed back into a corporate KPI dashboard which was checked each day. That revealed revenue per online visit, bounce rate, site speed, SEO ranking and traffic, and net promoter scores. “It allows us to track clearly and set data driven targets that we perform against and check on a daily basis,” said Cook, who stressed that was important as the company transitioned from a product company to a digital business.
But as Jodie Sangster, CEO of ADMA noted, while data did deliver the opportunity to marketers to change the customer experience, companies should treat access to it as a privilege.
ADMA has already produced a series of guidelines about the handling and application of consumer data for marketing and advertising purposes. It is now spearheading the formation of a Data Governance Institute for Australia. Sangster said the Institute would launch in July and develop guidelines for multipurpose applications of consumer or citizen data.
Image courtesy of Disney.com
