Data

Data is quickly becoming the true north for advertising and marketing. With the rate of advances in the ability to define and target a desired audience, campaign results are becoming more predictive and dependable than ever before. Creativity, being led by data, continues to show more promise and maturity, presenting a truly revolutionary opportunity for the industry.

With that great opportunity comes profound challenges for marketers to build their teams, processes and technology stack to take full advantage of the data tools available. Marketers and executives have been conditioned to receive true empirical results with real measurement to justify budgets and campaign results. The previous days of using your gut are gone in favor of data, in its various forms, informing every decision.

Even with the growth of data as the backbone of advertising, there are indicators that access, mining, and processing data to produce an expected result are still in transition and evolution. As advertisers attempt to distill human behavior and complexity into data nuggets that assume interest, the human target in the wild is infinitely more complex than the model targeting them.

Mobile, tablets and the proliferation of devices was the first wave of targeting complexity. With the rise of wearables and connected devices and the Internet of Things, data will become richer, with the end goal of delivering real-time against a more robust and true representation of the individual and, ultimately, better for brands and marketers.

What are the trending best options for marketers? How should they shape their campaigns, creative, tech stack and program to best utilize the tools available? What is the best data to use and why?

These are only three of the hundreds of questions that can (and might) be asked in the Data Track at Advertising Week, presented by Acxiom.