Marketing is the new finance

Or how the age of big consumer data will transform Branding into Brandformance.

As technology costs (devices, connectivity and memory) drops, more consumer signals will be tracked, and stored. Not only signals collected online from watching ads or clicking on them, but anything from visiting a store, reading a magazine offline, trying a product, walking down the street, etc. Surely, many of you have seen a surge in the amount of data available in your company.

This is also occurring on typical branding sacred cows such as online video, where I can effortlessly collect remarketing lists from the videos viewed in my brand's channel or see all sorts of analytics data based on what people have decided to watch and why. The sort of info, we as marketers would have loved to have in the past, and never had.

Slowly, but surely Branding will be pushed from all sides (specially the CEO and the CFO) to be much more performance driven (aka the Brandformance buzz word), and to be able to leverage to the max the big amount of data collected. 

This will imply important organizational changes, as well as new job descriptions and profiles. Uncovering powerful actionable insights will require people that are able to establish the right econometric models to identify the right causalities and help define the right marketing actions to drive business growth. Also, new companies specialized in data management - along with the usual consulting suspects - will pop out to help out big corporations. Marketing research will be ruthlessly transformed and overworked, gaining new status and respect. And as a result of all this data driven activity, we will have to change many accepted rules of thumb to how brands are created or business models work.

And our ecosystem of advertising, media, social agencies will need to be prepared to be greatly challenged by data, and be empowered by it to create better content, in video, photos or your name it.

This will probably also alter the way in which we develop our advertising campaigns. Instead of adapting TV to the rest (taking the 20 second commercial to YouTube), smart brands will first win in the digital space, try out what works best and put their bets with more confidence on the winning creatives.

If you are an old school marketer you better start working on it, because - guess what - it ain't going to be easy: New rules, new agencies, new profiles, new brands, new limits and new uncertainties...But also a much more respected status within the organization, broader capacity to stop arbitrary marketing budget cuts, defend your bold propositions with solid numbers, and find the levers that are really driving your business.

And if this not sufficient incentive, creative guys will still be much needed. They will have many more inputs to drive their creativity in the right direction and to focus on what really makes the difference.

Welcome to a new marketing world, welcome to BrandFormance.