The morning addressed the trends of mobile and emerging markets. Two things stood out – overcoming costs of handsets/data and the scale of the numbers as hurdles are reduced. They’re talking about managing the data of billions of people coming online. Data and airtime are consumer currencies that are both a burden and boom. Small sums of money required to buy texting add up to ridiculously large % of daily wages. The presenter Jana.com showed ways that they are reducing these costs to serve both social and advertiser goals by enabling an exchange of data. In one instance it was about the blood supply at local clinics, in another it was getting marketer’s apps installed.
The afternoon had a shoot out of 12 data driven ventures where each had 10 minutes to explain themselves to a panel who will reveal winners tonight at dinner. The 12 were:
USA – Databox which is an app that brings the top KPIs to manager’s fingertips on their phone. Super impressive interface that I am sure will do well with executives who want to have a never ending pulse of their business.
Canada – Datacratic is Canada’s entry in the competition with a first party data management platform with machine learning and decision engine that is agnostic to the media platforms. Important as companies begin to use their first party more in programmatic settings where control of proprietary data is as important as the bidding/buying optimizations.
Argentina – Fligoo although the website talks about a gift recommendation the tech behind it is showing people as a combination of their types of profiles. It sees people as multifaceted and not as simple as “sports aficionado” for instance.
Israel – iDSCREEN – recognition of tv spots across multiple broadcasters and multiple countries and recreates the delivered media plan. Very cool although I wondered if they would be better focused at working with other analytic companies to correlate outcomes.
Singapore – JamiQ Imagine the complexity of dealing with multiple languages in a social media monitoring setting. You have languages with no spaces and others that read right to left, apparently Thai is the biggest challenge of them all.
USA – Pixalate talked about fraud detection and prevention. It certainly is a big problem, it would have been nice to see how this software is showing success in fraud reduction given its use.
USA – Placed showed some simple brilliance to handling location data. Stunning from a retail perspective but answers a simple question – where were you before you got inhere and where did you turn up next. The insight is that location is a string of data in time. Which retailer now and then what next plus the visualization of the data was very cool.
UK – RealEyes is a great concept, they watch you watch video. From there they turn it into emotional analysis based on facial gesture. Be prepared to turn on your webcam and sign a privacy policy. The creative implications are evident.
France – Semsoft is about data agility recognizing that the big business hurdle is implementation of data products. Perhaps not as sexy as others but maybe more actionable in ensuring data actually can be used instead of just collected.
USA – Shareablee goes beyond “likes” to understand the depth of social connections. This was one where you got the sense there were real data geeks having fun with the data and turning into marketing analysis. No wonder comScore has a deal with them.
New Zealand – Vmob is looking at boosting retail interactions through an enterprise retail location manager. Offers are managed based on profiling, timing and location history plus other data that be brought to the system such as weather.
Sweden – Burt looks at optimizing publisher data to drive revenue from content. They discovered that most publishers have poor data visibility to where the money is made from the content and have built a system that gets the data into the hands of many stakeholders within the publisher to align them towards revenue.
As an overall perspective these companies are demonstrating that innovation is happening at the campaign level for marketers. These are interesting tools that in some way could be cobbled together to provide a powerful combination of data for marketers that goes beyond the usual data that is being used in traditional media planning.