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DMA blog highlights the pivotal role of the Chief Data Officer

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By Topics | Customer Intelligence

DMA Advance is the official blog of the Direct Marketing Association.Stephanie Miller at The DMA is challenging marketers to see data differently. In her most recent blog post in the See Data Differently series of the DMA Advance blog, she spotlights the pivotal role for marketing of the Chief Data Officer.

By describing the work and perspectives of Todd Cullen, Chief Data Officer at Ogilvy & Mather, the focus settles on Cullen's plans to guide his agency customers to get more revenue based on the right approach to customer data and analytics.

Citing the misguided focus on the technological (and technical) challenges of big data, his is a call for marketers to focus on getting at the "right data," or the insights that inform accurate and effective relationships, loyalty programs and lifetime value focus. It's also about using data responsibly, and he couldn’t be more right. The risk in abusing the governance and use of customer data is two fold – we’ll annoy our customers to the point where our offers and messages become irrelevant, or we’ll prompt legislation that will curb the use of data and hamstring modern marketing as we know it.

These details and more are laid out succinctly in Stephanie's blog post titled, "Want More Revenue? Get a Chief Data Officer in Your Corner." Todd Cullen will also have a keynote session at the DMA's newly relaunched NCDM conference. NCDM is happening this year on December 9 - 11, 2013 in Las Vegas, NV. SAS is a proud sponsor of NCDM, as well as a proud member of the DMA.

Tags analytics big data ncdm the DMA
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About Author

John Balla

Principal Marketing Strategist

Hi, I'm John Balla - I co-founded the SAS Customer Intelligence blog and served as Editor for five years. I held a number of marketing roles at SAS as Content Strategist, Industry Field Marketing and as Go-to-Marketing Lead for our Customer Intelligence Solutions. I like to find and share content and experiences that open doors, answer questions, and sometimes challenge assumptions so better questions can be asked. Outside of work I am an avid downhill snow skier, hiker and beach enthusiast. I stay busy with my family, volunteering for civic causes, keeping my garden green, striving for green living, expressing myself with puns, and making my own café con leche every morning. I’ve lived and worked on 3 contents and can communicate fluently in Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian and get by with passable English. Prior to SAS, my experience in marketing ranges from Fortune 100 companies to co-founding two start ups. I studied economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got an MBA from Georgetown. Follow me on Twitter. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

2 Comments

  1. Chase from ReSci on

    John,

    Just sent you a connect request on LI.
    I believe Gartner has put out research suggesting that CMO's will have a similar IT budget to the CIO in the coming years-crazy!

    I totally agree that data is going to be a huge leverage point for marketers in terms of bringing relevance to their audience. Artificial Intelligence will subsequently become more and more important in terms of segmentation and creating 1:1 campaigns that would be impossible for any team of marketers manually. I recently wrote a blog on the topic if you're interested: https://www.retentionscience.com/customer-segmentation-101/

    Thanks for your post!
    Chase

    Reply
    • John Balla
      John Balla on

      Thanks, Chase!
      I like the points you've made about AI and I think you're onto something. Going forward, the key will be for marketers to stay engaged and work in parallel with the algorithms so the evolving strategy hews closer to what's relevant. It will be too tempting to put the algorithms on "auto pilot," which can be disastrous over time because any errors or imperfections will be amplified. Fun times we live in, eh?
      Cheers!
      JB

      Reply

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