At a recent MESA - Hollywood IT Society Digital Marketing conference, Claudio Ludovisi, SVP, Operational Strategy NBCU Entertainment for Marketing & Digital took a live poll of about 200 or so media marketing executives in the audience and asked them to “Think about what it takes to achieve true multiplatform marketing ... what ONE word comes to mind?”

Within seconds this word cloud began to appear and it was apparent that the winner was data! Besides marketing synergy, audience engagement, and strategy, it is all about the data – specifically big data that comes from:  offline first-party CRM and transactional data; online digital analytics data (structured and unstructured, known and anonymous) from web analytics and advertising offerings; and third-party data from data management platforms.  All of these are equally important and are a summation of how today’s ever connected consumers are interacting with brands and content.

This is very consistent with our experience at SAS with our media, communications and entertainment customers. Since online/digital advertising now accounts for 31 percent of paid advertising spend, tied with offline channels and catching up to TV, it is more critical more than ever to be able to combine these data sources and make real time offers and content recommendations. If you think about the ever-connected consumer with the average person having 3-4 connected devices this is the way to get the consumers’ mind share.  However, the ability to bring all this insight together leaves digital and attribution marketers scratching their heads trying to figure this all out and how to measure their organizations digital marketing success. Even in the most leading edge and innovative companies in the world.

The solution to gaining true digital intelligence is a strong data management tool capable of performing master data management (the ability to stitch together consumer data from siloed sources to create one unified customer “golden” record) plus world class big data analytics and data visualization with the goal being to marry the online and offline and then discover all the correlations and behavioral predictions on consumer.  With the key attribute of these systems being able to handle not just big but huge data volumes.

At SAS, we are working with many leading companies to do just this. Whether it is a TV network, a sports team or league, or a digital publisher, SAS is helping marketers to attain digital intelligence and break barriers they did not previously think possible. To learn more about this topic and SAS’ capabilities, please check out this whitepaper, Big Digital Data, Analytic Visualization and the Opportunity of Digital Intelligence, written by Suneel Grover a SAS Senior Solutions Architect for Customer Intelligence and Advanced Analytics and adjunct professor at George Washington University.