Want to be a true strategic partner? The key is insights | Advertising

Over the course of my career working with marketers and agency partners, it’s inevitable that I get asked, “Tell me something I don’t know.” For some, this request can be frustrating or daunting. The truth is, it’s one of my favorite to answer. The ability to share something new about your business, your existing customers or even your prospective customers is one of the ways to earn the title of “strategic partner.” And the key to this is insights.

Can’t you just Google this kind of information? Well, just because you can Google something doesn’t mean you’re getting an insight. If we’re going to respond to the request to “tell me something I don’t know,” then we must become obsessed with understanding as many dimensions as possible about consumer behavior. And that starts with data. Not all data is created equal, however “garbage in, garbage out,” as the saying goes. Given that it comes directly from the consumer, rst-party data is vastly more valuable than third-party data, for example. An internet-scale rst-party data set that is unduplicated, real-time and not panel-based is a prerequisite to analyzing the many behavioral dimensions of your audiences.

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