Raheem Akingbolu
For businesses to flourish and contribute meaningfully to the economy, there is a need for easy access to data, a leading media buying practitioner, Emeka Okeke, has stated.
According to a report by MarketingEdge, a marketing journal, Okeke, who is the Group Managing Director of Mediafuse Dentsu International admitted that data is still a challenge in Nigeria and that there is no single source for people-based marketing data.
He pointed out that platforms that aggregate robust personal data are either don’t exist and where they exist, are only scratching the surface of masses of data in the market and constrained by privacy laws to use them for marketing.
He maintained that data is still in the hands of big media tech companies like Google, Facebook and others.
He said: “We are still working with proxy data to determine trends as sample numbers represent segments. Compare this to people-based marketing data that targets individuals and follows their behaviour across the various touchpoints using both their digital and offline footprint given the growing convergence nature of the communication ecosystem.
“We have data, yet we don’t have data. Robust data requires a lot of investment and with the potential death of cookie data, investment in platforms and private data networks becomes imperative for marketers. Cookies have been the backbone of the open internet, but with the clock fast ticking on third-party. Cookies, we need to plan for disruption tomorrow by rethinking data strategies today. Measurability is still an issue. What data are we using today in the market? For instance, media independent agencies use AMPS (All Media Products Survey), Radio and Linear TV diaries for planning purposes (RAMS and TAMS).
“RAMs and TAMs (Radio Audience Measurements and TV Audience Measurements) parameters are still the industry standard for traditional radio and tv channel planning. The major challenges with these are, recently, real time access and coverage. AMPS comes once a year. I am not sure if anyone would have done anything in 2020 given the disruption caused by Covid-19 pandemic. Good as these data sources are given the market’s level of sophistication, they are essentially passive and don’t yet measure overnight changes in channel consumption. They are unlike real time digital data that are associated with digital media reporting dashboards.”
“Given the difficulty in accessing sales data from most clients and that can be used for econometric modelling to actually unearth the contribution of the different channels in the marketing mix deployed by clients attributable to product sales and revenue, traditional communication agencies will continue to struggle to rationalise investments made by clients through them to manage their campaigns. Econometric modelling is not cheap and therefore requires data stacks from both clients and third parties over a period of time to deploy to make a sense of it all,” he stated.
