There’s a revealing and thought-provoking interview professionals toiling in digital, native, data, and related fields should read. eMarketer recently talked with Omar Tawakol, former BlueKai CEO and now Oracle’s Data Cloud honcho (and the company’s Data as a Service for Business).
Highlights from the conversation include the fact that Tawakol believes cross-linking is critical. In fact, he says, it’s the biggest trend out there.
“Cross-linking everything across screens and devices is the biggest and most important trend this year. Marketers have these first-party data assets: data tied to email, data tied to a physical address, data tied to cookies—and they’re all massively disconnected,” explained Tawakol. “Linking allows you to target across devices and measure whether an ad on a mobile device or PC drove an in-store sale. These types of insights will be important for advertisers, particularly those in the automotive, retail, and travel industries, where a lot of transactions happen physically in the real world.”
To do this, is better data (and analysis) needed? Yes, contends Tawakol.
“Data quality has been a problem since day one,” Tawakol said. “We get demographic information from dozens of sources, and a lot of them are data companies that people know and trust. The problem is these companies have different quality metrics on what they think is acceptable for putting demographic data on a cookie.”
The problem?
“Some might be putting household data onto a cookie,” he explained. “If a household attribute is tied to a cookie, that’s a problem for a household of four where half are female and half are male. They can’t all be tagged with a single demographic.”
Another Tawakol insight?
“The industry is getting fed up with interruptive ads. Some brands recognize that it’s better to provide services to people rather than interruptive ads.”
Is Tawakol concerned that native advertising might be reaching an over-saturation point?
“That’s already happening, and it’s frustrating,” said Tawakol. “Ultimately, the backlash will be lower performance. The reason the other stuff worked is because the ad was useful to the consumer and wasn’t mixed in a way that interrupted what they were doing. The more noisy we make native advertising, the more it hurts the unit to the point it starts to perform like a banner ad.”
Read the entire revealing interview here.