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Marketing departments ‘rely on outdated data and analytics practices’
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The majority of marketing departments still rely on outdated practices when it comes to marketing data and analytics, according to a new report.

Of the almost two-thirds of marketers surveyed by Adverity who believe their company is analytically mature, some 77% have yet to achieve a single unified view of their marketing performance while 68% still depend on spreadsheets for reporting.

At the same time, although 61% of marketing departments see developing predictive analytics as a key strategic aim in 2022, more than a third of those still struggle with manual data integration and some 48% say they do not trust the accuracy of their marketing data.

Conducted by Sirkin Research, the report surveyed almost 1,000 marketers and data analysts from around the world about their current data capabilities and aspirations for 2022.  Alongside businesses’ aspirations for predictive analytics, the research also revealed a worrying disconnect between analysts and marketers when it comes to understanding what their business’s current capabilities are.

For example, 60% of marketing data analysts say their organization already has the capacity to run predictive models, and yet only 42% of marketers agree. Similarly, although the majority (59%) of analysts say their company has a centralized data warehouse, only 43% of marketers say that’s the case.

“While the confidence of marketing departments in their analytical capabilities is commendable, that so many businesses are actually still struggling with the basics tells a very different story,” said Adverity CMO, Harriet Durnford-Smith.

Jeff Sirkin, CEO of Sirkin Research, added: “Yet, it’s the marketers who are actually the ones who should be utilizing those capabilities to make decisions and determine where budget is spent. If they don’t know what their company’s current capabilities are, this not only hinders their effectiveness, it is also a waste of money for the business. As such, bridging this divide should be a top priority for CMOs in 2022.”

The new research comes on the heels of Adverity’s “Marketing Analytics State of Play 2022: Challenges and Priorities” research report, which outlined the pain points facing modern marketers and data analysts–most notably, a lack of trust in the data. This new report builds out further how marketers can reflect on the challenges that they currently face and helps to identify solutions that will provide guidance for how to prioritize modernization in 2022.

Valid proof of consent: What marketers need to know
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By OneTrust

Data, trust, and compliance are three big focus areas for marketers. In terms of consent, obtaining it from your audience is critical to executing marketing activities in a privacy-centric way – and so is proving you’ve obtained that consent.

Consent matters not only for staying compliant with global privacy regulations, including the GDPR, but also for establishing a relationship of trust between your brand and your customer base. As your organization begins to initiate a stronger relationship of trust with the end user, it’s important to build a marketing-consented database and be able to centralize consent details such as what the end user consented to, what they were told upon consent, etc. Empowering your organization to be an industry leader in customer trust and compliance means that you must address one key issue: valid consent.

What is Valid Consent?

Valid consent addresses the call for proof of consent across multiple regulations (e.g. GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, etc.). Obtaining valid proof of consent is key in enabling your organization to acquire and use marketing data ethically. It also allows you to provide tangible evidence to your customer base when necessary. Many organizations today have consent stored as a simple yes or no flag with a timestamp in their CRM or marketing automation tool, which is not considered fully compliant. Multiple regulations provide guidance on keeping valid proof of consent, but you will need to at the very least track the following:

  • Who consented and when they consented
  • What they were told at the time of consent
  • How they consented

Many marketers rely on a simple checkbox and a yes/no answer for consent. However, to properly demonstrate consent, you need records that include:

  • The name of the individual or another identifier (e.g. online user, name, session ID)
  • Dated documents or online records that include a timestamp
  • A master copy of the document or data capture form Version and copy of any privacy policy or notice shown at the time
  • Offline: a copy of the relevant documentation
  • Online: should include data submitted and a link to the relevant form version of the captured data

To learn what marketing activities require consent and what regulations apply, download this free infographic from OneTrust Consent and Preferences.

34% of CMOs ‘don’t trust’ their marketing data
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Over a third of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) don’t trust their marketing data, rising to 41% among their data analyst colleagues – posing a challenge for the C-suite charged with driving marketing results.

That’s according to research from leading marketing data analytics platform Adverity. What’s more, there is a growing divide between data analysts and marketers when it comes to trusting their data.

Yet, the very same divide deepens at the leadership level—with 51% of Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) & Chief Data Officers (CDOs) lacking trust in the data compared to 34% of CMOs.

The new “Marketing Analytics State of Play 2022: Challenges and Priorities” research commissioned by Adverity surveyed 964 marketers and data analysts across the U.S., U.K., and Germany, identifying the key strategic challenges faced by marketers and data analysts as well as their priorities for 2022.

For businesses, such a trust divide that becomes greater the more senior you go should cause significant alarm. Teams are failing to communicate mistrust, which results in key strategic decisions regarding spending, budget allocation, and campaign optimization being made without accuracy or confidence, potentially resulting in huge amounts of the marketing budget being misused or ultimately wasted.

One of the most likely causes of the distrust in marketing data and the number one challenge cited by both marketers and data analysts (42%) is the time being wasted manually wrangling data. At the C-level, this jumps to 54%.

“Modern marketing can’t afford to wait three weeks for someone to sift through a spreadsheet. By manually wrangling data, businesses not only open themselves up to human error and inefficiency but also commit themselves to a reactive strategy,” said Harriet Durnford-Smith, CMO at Adverity. “Those who cannot keep up with the evolution or aren’t willing to embrace the new ways of working will ultimately be left behind. Moving away from manually wrangling data is the first step to becoming a data-driven business.”

As marketing spend continues to recover to pre-pandemic levels and marketers are challenged to demonstrate the Return on Investment (ROI) of their campaigns, being able to demonstrate the business impact of marketing is imperative. However, 38% of data and marketing professionals state the inability to measure ROI on marketing spend is one of their biggest challenges. Combined with a lack of trust in the data, this can cause significant problems for businesses.

Looking forward to 2022, 65% of marketers and data analysts state that audience-building and targeting along with personalized content delivery is their most important strategic focus. This is unsurprising given concerns around third-party cookie deprecation and the increasing strictness of privacy laws. Content in the future is likely to have to work harder for businesses to gain access to customers’ zero and first-party data. Creating a tailored and transparent value proposition is an essential strategy for achieving this.

However, businesses need to also invest in their campaign reporting capabilities. Respondents that already have strong campaign reporting are three times more likely to be strong at audience-building and targeting and delivering personalized content/customer experiences.

Shockingly, businesses that already have strong campaign reporting are also three times more likely to invest in it than businesses that said they need to improve. Meaning that the divide between those who are garnering greater insights from their reports and those who are not is only widening.

Is your data safe? 80% of global organisations expect breaches of customer records
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Trend Micro and the Ponemon Institute have revealed the findings of a study which discovered that 86% of global organisations expect to suffer a cyber attack in the next 12 months.

The findings come from Trend Micro’s biannual Cyber Risk Index (CRI) report, which measures the gap between respondents’ cybersecurity preparedness versus their likelihood of being attacked. In the first half of 2021 the CRI surveyed more than 3,600 businesses of all sizes and industries across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.

The CRI is based on a numerical scale of -10 to 10, with -10 representing the highest level of risk. The current global index stands at -0.42, a slight increase on last year which indicates an “elevated” risk.

Organizations ranked the top three negative consequences of an attack as customer churn, lost IP and critical infrastructure damage/disruption.

Key findings from the report include:

  • 86% said it was somewhat to very likely that they’d suffer serious cyber-attacks in the next 12 months, compared to 83% last time
  • 24% suffered 7+ cyber attacks that infiltrated networks/systems, versus 23% in the previous report.
  • 21% had 7+ breaches of information assets, versus 19% in the previous report.
  • 20% of respondents said they’d suffered 7+ breaches of customer data over the past year, up from 17% in the last report.

“Once again we’ve found plenty to keep CISOs awake at night, from operational and infrastructure risks to data protection, threat activity and human-shaped challenges,” said Jon Clay, vice president of threat intelligence for Trend Micro. “To lower cyber risk, organizations must be better prepared by going back to basics, identifying the critical data most at risk, focusing on the threats that matter most to their business, and delivering multi-layered protection from comprehensive, connected platforms.”

“Trend Micro’s CRI continues to be a helpful tool to help companies better understand their cyber risk,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, CEO for the Ponemon Institute. “Businesses globally can use this resource to prioritize their security strategy and focus their resources to best manage their cyber risk. This type of resource is increasingly useful as harmful security incidents continue to be a challenge for businesses of all sizes and industries.”

Among the top two infrastructure risks was cloud computing. Global organizations gave it a 6.77, ranking it as an elevated risk on the index’s 10-point scale. Many respondents admitted they spend “considerable resources” managing third party risks like cloud providers.

The top cyber risks highlighted in the report were as follows:

  • Man-in-the-middle attacks
  • Ransomware
  • Phishing and social engineering
  • Fileless attack
  • Botnets

The top security risks to infrastructure remain the same as last year, and include organizational misalignment and complexity, as well as cloud computing infrastructure and providers. In addition, respondents identified customerturnover, lost intellectual property and disruption or damages to critical infrastructure as key operational risks for organizations globally.

The main challenges for cybersecurity preparedness include limitations for security leaders who lack the authority and resources to achieve a strong security posture, as well as organizations struggling to enable security technologies that are sufficient to protect their data assets and IT infrastructure.

ASA publishes latest study into restricted ads in children’s media
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The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has published the findings from its fourth monitoring sweep, as part of a year-long project to identify and tackle age-restricted ads appearing in children’s online media.

Whilst the overwhelming majority of age-restricted ads are targeted responsibly in online media, targeting audiences heavily weighted (75 %+) to adult audiences, a minority end up in children’s online media.

Advertisers placing age-restricted ads online are required, under the Advertising Code, to take care to target their ads away from child audiences. In particular, that means websites and YouTube channels designed for children or that attract a disproportionately high child audience cannot carry age-restricted ads.

The latest report continued what the ASA calls CCTV-style scrutiny of online ads for: gambling, alcohol, e-cigarettes and tobacco, slimming and weight control products and food and soft drinks classified as high in fat, salt or sugar (HFSS products).

Since undertaking the monitoring, the UK Government has announced new restrictions on the advertising of HFSS products on TV and online, which are due to take effect from the beginning of 2023. That policy shift does not change the ASA’s responsibility to take action against HFSS ads placed, in breach of the current rules, in children’s media.

Between January and March 2021, using monitoring tools to capture age-restricted ads served on a sample of 49 websites and 12 YouTube channels attracting a disproportionately high child audience, the ASA found that:

  • Overall, 158 age-restricted ads broke the advertising rules; and
  • In total, 41 advertisers placed age-restricted ads in 33 websites and 8 YouTube channels aimed at, or attracting a disproportionately large, child audience.

A breakdown of ads by product category that broke the rules reveals:

Alcohol:

  • 7 alcohol ads by 3 advertisers on 8 websites

Gambling:

  • 29 ads by 3 advertisers on 17 websites

HFSS:

  • 117 ads by 31 advertisers on 31 websites and 8 YouTube channels

Weight reduction:

  • 5 ads by 4 advertisers on 4 websites

Smoking:

  • No ads for e-cigarettes or tobacco products were picked up during this monitoring period

The ASA says its preliminary inspection of the data suggests that the majority of advertisers who it identified breaking the rules in earlier monitoring sweeps have not reoffended. It has warned the advertisers who we have caught in this latest sweep to review and, as necessary, amend their practices to ensure they target future ads responsibly.

Throughout the last year, harnessing innovative monitoring technology as part of a five-year strategy, More Impact Online, has proved effective in helping the ASA identify and tackle irresponsibly placed ads for age restricted products at scale and speed to better protect children.

Social media solutions top marketer buying trends in 2021
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Social Media Management and Lead Generation top the list of services the UK’s leading marketing professionals are sourcing in 2021.

The findings have been revealed by the Digital Marketing Solutions Summit and are based on delegate requirements at this month’s event.

Delegates registering to attend were asked which areas they needed to invest in during 2021 and beyond.

A significant 61% are looking to invest in Social Media, followed by Lead Generation & Tracking at 58% and Customer Engagement at 56%.

Just behind were Google Ads (50%) and Email Marketing (47%).

% of delegates at the Digital Marketing Solutions Summit sourcing certain products & solutions (Top 10):

Social Media 61%
Lead Generation & Tracking 58%
Customer Engagement 56%
Google Ads 50%
Email Marketing 47%
Engagement Marketing 47%
Online Strategy 44%
Search Engine Optimisation 50%
Strategy Marketing 44%
Multi-channel Engagement 42%

To find out more about the Digital Marketing Solutions Summit, visit https://digitalmarketingsolutionssummit.co.uk.

Consumers in emerging markets more open to sharing data
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Countries like China, Brazil and South Africa are much more open to sharing their personal data with companies than consumers in Western countries, like the UK, France and the US, according to new research from emlyon business school.

The findings come from a global study of over 22,000 online shoppers, which looked into their willingness to share their personal information, like identification and financial data, with companies when purchasing products.

The researchers; Monica Grosso, Associate Professor of Marketing at emlyon, alongside colleagues from Bocconi School of Management, KU Leuven, CEFAM International School of Business and Management and the Center for Service Intelligence, wanted to understand what factors had an impact on the willingness of consumers to share personal data with companies.

The factors they reviewed were: whether the type of product had an impact, whether the country consumers were from had an impact, and whether and how customers could be incentivised to provide further data even if they weren’t willing to in the first place.

Through the survey, the researchers gathered data on over 22,000 shoppers, who were buying products from seven different categories; identification, medical, financial, locational, demographic, lifestyle, and media usage data.

The research also focused on the privacy concerns and willingness of participants in fourteen different countries, ranging from highly individualistic, such as the UK, France, the United States, Canada and Australia, to collectivist nations, including China, Brazil and South Africa.

The researchers also reviewed whether customers were more likely to share their personal data and information if there was some form of compensation for doing so.

Professor Grosso said: “Given sharing personal data online is often on a voluntary basis, it is difficult for companies to persuade customer’s to do so. Not only this, but in the wake of high-profile privacy scandals, customers have become increasingly worried about how organizations store and exploit their personal data. Consumers have therefore become more cautious about sharing such data with retail companies. Therefore understanding the market, and having a full-proof strategy to maximise data sharing of customers is vital for marketing departments”.

The researchers also found that once offered compensation and incentives for sharing their personal data, consumers in all contexts were more likely to provide their data to companies. This compensation and incentives included a tangible benefit for the customers, such as discount coupons or small free gifts, showing that there are clear, effective methods for companies to use to garner more data from their consumers.

Grosso added: “Companies are always keen to secure as much data as they can from their customers in order to inform increase future sales tailor marketing efforts to their needs, and boost customer brand loyalty, but often customers are reluctant and unwilling to provide such data. These results show trust can differ across contexts, and customers can be further encouraged to provide personal data through a number of tailored methods.”

For companies, the research shows that the willingness of consumers to share varies greatly over different countries. Therefore, if companies are looking to collect vital data from their customers in different country contexts, they should adopt different privacy strategies based on the information type, country, and product category.

ICO issued fines of £42million last year
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The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a number of final civil monetary penalties in 2020, totalling £42,416,000 – The reasons for the fines included breaches of Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) and the Data Protection Act (DPA). 

The data, contained in the ICO’s ‘work to recover fines’ report and analysed by the Parliament Street Think Tank, reveals a catalogue of fines issued across a variety of sectors.

The analysis shows the scale of the fines highlights the severity of the problem. A total of 17 penalties were issued last year according to official figures. The largest fine was given to British Airways in the transport and leisure sector on 16th October 2020 at a total of £20,000,000 for a breach of the Data Protection Act (DPA). This is followed by a fine of £18,400,000, issued to Marriott International Inc on 30th October 2020, also for a breach of the DPA. 

The next largest was to Ticketmaster LTD, with a fine totalling £1,250,000 for data breaches on 13th November 2020. Then, DSG Retail Ltd, CRDNN Limited and Cathay Pacific all received fines totalling £500,000. 

Additionally, CRDNN was with a £500,000 fine on 2nd March 2021 for breaches of Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR).

The industry hit with the biggest fines was marketing with nine fines in total issued, followed by three fines issued to firms in the transport and leisure sector.

Additionally, the ICO issued three court orders for winding-up upon petitions in 2020. Trusted Futures Ltd received a penalty amount of £70,000, Superior Style Home Improvements received a penalty fee of £150,000 and Alistar Green Legal Services Ltd received a penalty fee of £90,000. All three organisations were given court orders in 2020.

Additionally, there were eight directors disqualified following ICO enforcement action in 2020. These directors have been disqualified for a number of years for conduct while acting for various companies.

Charlie Smith, Consultant Solutions Engineer, Barracuda Networks, said: “In today’s digital working environment, data security, recovery and protection is of vital importance. Unfortunately, it has become apparent that many business owners, workers and consumers are not aware of the need for backup and recovery services for their email service providers. Our own research even revealed that 40% of Office 365 users believe that Microsoft provides everything they need to protect their data and software.

“Whilst Office 365 does offer some level of security, even Microsoft suggests using a third party backup to ensure that data is fully protected and retrievable. Without it, organisations can be left prone to accidental data loss and even ransomware attacks. 

“Thus moving forward, organisations should invest in a third-party data backup solution that runs in the cloud, to enable seamless, efficient and comprehensive backup of data on a granular level – allowing lost, stolen or misplaced data to be restored without delay.”

UK entertainment sales driven to new highs by lockdown streaming
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Locked down Britain turned to digital music, video and games in record numbers in 2020, increasing entertainment revenues by 16.8% to a record £9.05bn, according to preliminary data compiled by the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA).   

It was the fastest growth rate since records began, driven above all by digital services, who saw revenues increase by £1.4bn over 2019 to a new high of £7.8bn. 

Digital video services spearheaded by Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video increased revenues by a remarkable 37.7% over 2019 while growing music streaming subscriptions saw recorded music revenues score their best result since 2006.

Gaming comfortably retained its lead as the largest of the three sectors, generating sales of more than £4bn for the first time.

Overall more than 80 pence in the pound spent on entertainment now goes to digital services rather than physical formats. Amid generally declining physical formats, vinyl LPs remain the shining exception, increasing sales by 13.3%. 

ERA CEO Kim Bayley said, “If there was ever a year in which we needed entertainment, it was 2020. The trend towards an increasingly digital entertainment market may be long established, but no one could have foreseen this dramatic leap as digital services filled the gap left by shuttered cinemas, concert halls and retail stores. With much of the country shut down, ERA’s members provided a welcome revenue stream for thousands of musicians, actors, directors and countless backroom staff.”