New Study Shows Inflection Point for Brands Using Data Driven Marketing Efforts For More Than Display Targeting

CUPERTINO, Calif., July 31, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- BlueKai, the leading Data Activation System for both marketers and publishers, today released its second Data Impact Report which revealed that brands are dramatically increasing their reliance on data to power their marketing efforts. According to the new study, 36% of respondents indicated that at least a fifth of their marketing budgets were "data driven" vs. only 11% cited in the company's report in December 2012, showing a staggering 227% increase over the last 6 months. This shows a rapid and dramatic increase in the power of data to drive results across more than just display targeting. Furthermore, many marketers were seeing positive impact from data-driven initiatives including an increase in performance, interaction and media efficiency.

"Big data and data infused marketing has been a hot topic for some time but mostly in terms of display targeting. What we're seeing now is that marketers are becoming more intelligent about how they use data for more than serving ads. They are looking to customize the entire user experience based on what they know about their audience," said Cory Treffiletti, Senior Vice President of Marketing for BlueKai. "Marketers are starting to see the full impact of data. They can deliver uplift in conversions and acquisitions on their site and deliver more targeted messages across all digital channels. We believe the next 18 months we will see not only more brands engage in central data management but a continued reliance on data as the central current for all marketing activity."

The study, which relied on more than 100 marketing executives and media-buying decision makers at some of the world's leading brands, agencies and publishers, also showed that marketers are mostly concerned about expanding the use of data to various marketing disciplines.  When asked which were the areas most important for data to expand to, analytics was cited as the number one factor, followed by search and social, which topped last year's survey. Display ranked at number 7 in terms of importance while social surprisingly moved out of the previous top three, overtaken by email and search. 

BlueKai also found that more than 50% of respondents reported they spend less than 25% of their marketing efforts on mobile marketing. And while mobile increasingly becomes top of mind for marketers, it still remains an untapped resource and channel for data-driven marketing initiatives.

Additional findings from the report include:

Horizontal integration remains supreme: More than 64% surveyed said horizontal integration (i.e. data usage across various marketing execution layers) is more important than vertical integration (i.e. data application that goes deep into one specific practice like 'ad targeting'), which marked a 2% increase since last year's report.

Applications for audience data are growing:  Primary uses for data in marketing are for email delivery, re-targeting, display targeting and creative optimization.  Emerging use cases for data include site customization, lookalike modeling and attribution, reflecting an interest to push data intelligence beyond email and ad targeting. 

Marketers value first party data: Marketers are still generally savvy about using both first party and third party data with a slight preference for first party data such as site data, CRM data and email data. 

For a copy of the report, visit www.bluekai.com/dataimpact for a download.

About BlueKai

BlueKai (www.bluekai.com) is the world's first complete enterprise data activation system for intelligent marketing.  BlueKai offers its customers a solution for managing and activating all their 1^st and 3^rd party data for use in their marketing and customer interactions.  BlueKai represents the only end-to-end SaaS solution for marketers who are looking to maximize their cross-channel marketing efforts and create a proprietary solution for unlocking reach, scale and efficiency in their data.  BlueKai has led the data-driven marketing category since 2008 when it launched the world's first Data Exchange and then branched out to create the first Data Management Platform (DMP) for marketers.  BlueKai is currently trusted by, among thousands of others, 12 Fortune 30 corporations and numerous other brands and publishers to activate their data.

SOURCE BlueKai