Jim Sterne, The Digital Analytics Association

  • The heart of big data is volume, variety and velocity.
  • For analytics to be meaningful, goals must be defined, specific and supported.
  • Warning: correlation is not causation.

David Rogers, Columbia Business School Brand Centre

  • Metrics are only as good as your ability to ask great questions.
  • Don’t treat tweets as a KPI, unless you are Twitter.
  • Metrics are only as good as your ability to ask great questions.

Jake Bailey, RichRelevance

  • Macy’s CEO says every dollar of online sales equals almost $6 offline.

Mark Simpson, Maxymiser

  • Biggest piece of advice for retailers in 2013? Implement personalisation practices on your website.
  • Instead of trying to sell things to people on Facebook, use it as a source of data for personalisation.

Billy May, Abercrombe & Fitch

  • Social logins are more and more critical for retail – they help connect web and mobile. 

Jeff Ragovin, Salesforce Marketing Cloud

  • Target fans with content you know works and build your influencers by giving them content to share.
  • Track where people are sharing and what networks they are converting on. Targeted ads should drive people to targeted content.

Paul Young, Charity: Water

  • If a metric doesn’t help you drive decisions, forget the metric.
  • I don’t care about likes, friends or photos. It’s the revenue I care about.

Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax

  • Coupons are highly viral pieces of content, with ability to track the shares.
  • Couponing and discounting have always been invaluable tools, but the real gold is in earned rewards. It’s infinitely more engaging.

Venky Balakrishnan, Diageo

  • You might spend ages building the most incredible campaign, but if you don’t tell people about it they won’t come and see it. Brands need to create awareness at scale on the benefits of interacting with new technologies.
  • Brands tend to grossly overestimate how much time people are willing to give them. New forms of digital media have to be easy to access and understand, and effortless to act upon.
  • If you’re going to work hard innovating and raising the ceiling, you need to dedicate just as much time in getting the fundamentals in place. The more you innovate, the more you need to fix the basics.

Jeff Allen, Adobe

  • Within any given organisation it’s likely that almost everyone will have an opinion on the marketing strategy. So it’s up to marketers to convince their colleagues that they are the experts in what they do and can use data to prove it.
  • You need to work out which metrics matter most to the business. Think of it like the dashboard on your car. Do you know which metrics are the most important and need to be right there on the dashboard?
  • Marketers need to employ an effective attribution model so they know what contributed to positive results, as that’s ultimately the only way to repeat a successful outcome.
  • We’ve all been in meetings where we have to decide on which creative to go with. Then in walks the boss, and picks one and leaves. Even though you hate that one, you now have to use it. If marketers have a culture of testing they can neutralise the “HIPPO” (highest paid person’s opinion).
  • The more detailed information you have, the more detailed your segmentation becomes, which in turn will have a massive impact on your conversion rate.
  • We are creative, but know how to apply creativity to business and get results. Stay a marketer, don’t become a finance person.

Christy Amador, Coca-Cola

  • Coke’s marketing content always follows two basic principles – it has to be both liquid and linked. Liquid refers to the fact that the content needs to flexible and able to filter down through all areas of the brand’s marketing activities, but it also needs to be linked together.
  • We start with what we call ‘one big, fat, fertile idea’. If you start with that at the centre, it can flow down through all other platforms.

Anonymous soundbites

  • There are three keys assets for a CMO: customer data, analytics, content.
  • Put analytics at the beginning of a project not the end.
  • There are five key financial metrics: revenue, market share, customer acquisition, customer retention and ROI.
  • In social marketing there is no beginning and end. It’s ongoing.
  • Facebook is an interest graph. Twitter is a conversation graph.
  • Keep in mind: social needs to be baked into marketing. It won’t need to ‘separate’ soon.
  • The CMO needs to walk fine line between ‘creative’ and ‘creepy’ when using big data.
  • Brands that are successful in social are organised. They have a content calendar and identify trends.
  • Brands cannot create enough content by themselves, they must take advantage/curate relevant content generated by others.
  • Digital is a specialist capability but needs to be integrated in organisations.
  • As an example of big data in action, LexisNexis turned date of birth information for customer records into $2m of new revenue.
  • According to Gartner, by 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO.
  • Content without context is meaningless. To connect with your customers, you need to think in terms of contextual relevance.
  • The consumer is a pivotal part of your brand experience. They are already creating content and experiences for others.
  • People who pin a product on Pinterest are 6% more likely to buy that product.
  • A CapGemini report found that 71% of US corporates struggle with data inaccuracies on a daily basis.
  • Brands uses statistics like a drunk uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination.
  • Tip: do not measure social by last click. It’s in the middle of the sale journey.
  • In B2B 60% of the purchasing decision is made before speaking with a supplier.