It’s not that enterprise analytics is broken. The bigger issue, says Obele Brown-West, president of data intelligence platform Tracer, is that enterprise analytics was never all that functional to begin with.
“There are too many data sources, too many data sets floating around, and the technology is very complex,” Brown-West says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
The most recent LUMAscape is so crammed “you can’t even see the logos anymore,” she says.
Brown-West has firsthand experience trying to manage data complexity for brands. Before moving to Tracer last year as the company’s first-ever president, she spent most of her career on the buy side, including at iProspect, 360i, mcgarrybowen and, most recently, as chief solutions officer at Tinuiti.
One of the top challenges she’d hear marketers talk about is measurement – or, more accurately, the mess that measurement has become, as digital has gotten more fragmented.
But, hey, the complexity is also what makes digital marketing interesting.
Understanding the impact that a media investment had on a brand’s bottom line was easier in the past because the digital ecosystem used to be a far simpler animal.
“When I was at iProspect 20 years ago, there were only really two, maybe three things that you could do in digital,” Brown-West says. But the options have proliferated since then.
At the same time, signal is declining, which is making measurement and attribution even more difficult – and marketers do get that.
In fact, their “hair is on fire,” Brown-West says, although that urgency hasn’t necessarily reached every part of the organization, such as IT and the analytics team.
“If the entire organization isn’t rallied on the notion that they need to focus on solving the cookie deprecation issue,” she says, “that’s where the friction comes in.”
Also in this episode: The evolution of search, did SEO destroy the internet, whatever happened to the term “Big Data,” why January is a good time to invest in online advertising, Tracer’s Kevin Durant connection, pushing for more female leadership in tech and Brown-West’s glockenspiel abilities.
For more articles featuring Obele Brown-West, click here.
