SAN FRANCISCO – One of the many positive outcomes that have emerged as the result of major marketers demanding greater digital transparency is a renewed focus on data quality. “I think what’s actually exciting is that we’re coming back to a sense of quality after a large period of flux,” says Simmons CEO Andrew Feigenson.
Over the course of many months, brands like Procter & Gamble “have really asked that we as an industry start being more introspective about what we’re actually providing,” Feigenson adds in this interview with Beet.TV at RampUp 2018. “And I think what we’re seeing as a result of that is a group of companies that are spending more time making sure that their products are actually what they say they are.”
What are the end results? “That’s healthy for everybody. It’s going to grow digital, it’s going to grow use of data,” says Feigenson.
He observes that there are different uses for data—citing the top and bottom of the funnel—but that the industry has become “so obsessed with the tactics of media” that good brand strategy may have taken a back seat.
“Bad brand strategy won’t yield a result, good strategy will,” Feigenson says.
We’ve moved to a world where “we look at individual campaigns and those individual campaigns are used as a proxy for other strategies on or off. That translates into data as well.”
While large, deterministic datasets may be great for targeting, they’re not necessarily representative to a whole market analysis, according to Feigenson. He believes that more companies that have first-party data or rent large, third-party datasets “are going to calibrate that against panels to get a very holistic view of their consumer.”
Until recently, Simmons data were used to help plan media in a linear capacity. “We’re excited that after 60 years we finally realized that programmatic and we’ve on-boarded our segments through Acxiom and LiveRamp to be used in programmatic exchanges.”
The company’s game plan encompasses better technology plus “bigger and faster data.” The goal at the end of the day “is to get anybody to a game changing consumer insight about an audience quicker than they can get a cup of Starbucks coffee.”
This video is part of a series produced in San Francisco at the RampUp 2018 conference. The series is sponsored by Alphonso. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
