Taken to its most extreme , what you get when you combine two major characteristics of modern day communication - namely, more data and higher ad avoidance - is a very curious paradox indeed : we are collecting more data to better target people - who are then going on to not see our ads !
Now that is of course very extreme and said here only to convey the sense of the notion. To a lesser and perhaps less direct degree though, it's a not-inaccurate description of the marketplace today when you think about it. At a broad aggregate level , there is an invisible trade off between data and exposure happening out there. How the value added by more data offsets the value lost from fewer exposures is where the game is at today - and will increasingly be where it will be at going forward.
'Engagement' (in all its forms -Social , Native and what have you) and 'efficiency' (i.e. less waste) are two of the ways we are responding today but that's just the tip of the icerberg. I believe data itself will need to be paid a LOT more attention to - not only to the answers they throw up but also to the questions we ought to be asking. It can - it must ! - start from the simpest basics of everyday data. For example, if the 'Unique Views' on your video performance report is not truly that , i.e. not really unduplicated over the course of the campaign let alone across platforms , how reliable is 'Frequency Capping' ? If it is therefore not, then what is the unaccounted waste ? And so on. Brainware , the Human Touch if you will, is critical here if this has to be cracked.
I touched upon this Data-Exposure trade off only in passing in my recent Campaign Middle East essay on Fragmentation. My point point here was that the 'problem' is not so much media fragmentation as ad avoidance which the fragmentation trend correlates with - though not necessarily in a causal way !
