With an incredible first day kick-off about brand storytelling, Day 2 brought the focus to data. All of the speakers for the day specialised in sharpening up and utilising data, getting us all to rethink how we use the ubiquitous but misunderstood world of ‘big data’ today.
OMD UK’s Head of Innovation, Toby Gunton, opened by addressing the apparent rift between big data and big ideas, and promptly set about dismissing the idea of stale data that only stifles the creative process. He finished with a revised title, ‘Big Ideas and Big data’, inspiring us to encourage the union of data and ideas. With data, Toby told us, creative ideas had new fuel from insights, new means of execution (see British Airways #LookUp), and all-important new means of campaign measurement.
Addressing Toby’s first argument for big data, MaxPoint’s Chris Kozloski showed us the incredible insight that precision digital marketing can give. The huge volume of data they are able to source from shoppers and households with amazing accuracy enables them to provide targeted digital advertising on a national scale.
From knowing what you buy, to knowing how you feel, Crowd Emotion wowed us with their cloud-based system for capturing and studying biometric signals. And what exactly does this mean? That by studying your facial muscle movements they are able to detect and interpret emotional responses to anything at all – no more poker faces!
Next on the agenda was Ben Oakshott, Head of Sales at WorkDigitial. We were amazed by WorkDigital’s two incredible data products: Freshup, which allows you to augment CRM databases with social data, and Eventgraph data products, which allow you to take a point in space and time and find all the people who are socially active around it, and then to build a full profile for custom social advertising.
Our penultimate speaker of the day was from Ad-Venture – bringing targeting to TV advertising. Ad-Venture are the only company able to operate a live ad replacement service that can target individual views, giving us a glimpse at the future of TV advertising.
Finally we learned about Fansparks, a start-up that allows brands to harness their fan-to-fan network, taking their social influence further than ever. We learnt how they can help brands to incentivise their fans to spread a message on their behalf, with exciting results.
We all came out of Day 2 with a new-found appreciation for all that’s possible with data – and an appetite for finding out more from an inspiring range of companies.
