Advertising shifts focus toward data
Consumer products behemoth Procter and Gamble is moving a big chunk of its advertising budget to a new company called Omnicom. P&G owns classic brands like Crest, Charmin and Bounty, and it’s among the world’s largest advertisers — last year it spent more than $2.5 billion on ads.
More than $30 billion of media spending could be in play this year. Bottom line, companies want to reduce costs.
Andrea Marder-Kick is vice president of group planning, buying and analytics for the media agency Media Associates. She says as digital advertising explodes, data is the new currency in the advertising world.
“The new hot departments at every agency right now are the analytic departments,” she said.
These analytic departments are sifting through data like your Google searches and Facebook posts trying to figure out what you want to buy and where it’s best to sell it to you.
“It’s great if you have a lot of data, but if you don’t know how to use the data, or how to interpret the data or how to apply it for reaching your targets, it just becomes a data dump,” she said.
You could call all these changes to advertising a bit of an upheaval, but Marder-Kick works in the industry, so she puts a different spin on things.
“I wouldn’t call it an upheaval, I would call it a transformation,” she said.
There’s a lot happening in the world. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you.
You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible.
Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.
