One interesting facet of the COVID-19 outbreak has been the sudden primacy of data and science in setting policy. Today in AdExchanger’s podcast series “Social Distancing With Friends,” Wavemaker Global’s chief data sciences officer, Karima Zmerli, speaks to the evolving data story.
“For me the most important thing was to understand what model has been built to predict the impact from a health standpoint,” Karima says. “We heard Dr. Fauci explaining the models and their outputs: the minimum impact, the higher impact.”
For Wavemaker’s purposes, the key data point is duration. It’s also become an obsession for regular people as they set and reset their expectations.
“In the last few years the understanding of data has spread. It’s not only data people who understand data,” she says. “We have seen other people, marketers in particular, become more interested in data and trust data. That’s not going to stop.”
Also in this episode, exciting innovations are underway in identity and marketing research. The third-party cookie might be doomed, Karima says, but the measurement industry is filled with opportunity.
Finally, she notes that the sudden importance of technology such as Zoom and Slack under “shelter in place” belies the real impact of COVID-19 for people and workplaces.
“This is not a technical challenge. This is a human challenge. We need to change our ways of doing things and adjust to the new context.”
