Media fragmentation has made it essential that marketers paint a clear picture of their consumers using data. Look no further than the host of ad agencies developing data offerings this year, such as WPP’s purchase of InfoSum in April.
Brands have no shortage of disparate data sets, but often struggle to derive meaningful insights from them, said Alejandro Fuenmayor, Chief Media Officer at Tombras. That challenge is only magnified as users opt out of sharing personal data and regulators scrutinize the collection and sharing of such information.
What brands often don’t realize is that meaningful consumer insights can be tucked away in unexamined data sets. AdAge spoke with data experts to identify four sources of consumer insights marketers frequently overlook.
Geospatial Targeting as an Alternative to Demographic Profiling
Marketers are focused on identity and demographics, and agency partners have indulged them with things such as AI offerings that test against synthetic audiences. But there is plenty of information on real humans that is being underutilized, including geospatial data, which refers to information gathered from a person’s location and movement.
Marketers have viewed the technology as more of a vehicle for gimmicky activations than a serious source for consumer insights, Fuenmayor said. However, as consumers become more savvy about data privacy, marketers are having a harder time finding a one-stop shop for demographic, psychographic and transactional data. That challenge has made geospatial data more enticing, as consumers still show a willingness to turn on location services that offer key insights about their behavior.
“People are carrying a GPS on their phone 24/7, so you can get a pretty complete picture of what people are doing at different times,” Fuenmayor said. “If you’re an advertiser and you’re thinking about a holistic campaign, suddenly understanding people’s migration patterns can give you a lot of insights.”
For example, seeing commuting details could inform investment decisions in media channels such as audio or out-of-home.
“These are things that can help you build a more logical explanation than what most advertisers do, which is just create an audience roughly based on demographic patterns and then put that into a Meta or Google to try and reach as many of them as possible,” Fuenmayor said. “That may have some degree of success, but it depends on your scale.”
Tombras recently leveraged location data for a grocery and gas client that was challenged by consumers who stopped in for gas without buying food. After launching a geospatial analysis, it found that consumers would get food and coffee at neighboring restaurants after stopping in to get gas. Seeing that consumers were indeed visiting the client while hungry informed the decision to begin marketing food and coffee more heavily.
The Less Popular Use Case for Retail Media
Retail media is by no means overlooked in marketing. However, advocates say it’s still underutilized relative to its potential for providing insights about consumer behavior leading up to a purchase. Marketers are accustomed to pulling insights from Amazon’s data clean room, but take less advantage of similar offerings from retailers such as Walmart and Kroger, said Tavo Castro, Executive VP and Head of Strategic Planning and Investment at Tinuiti.
Walmart offers marketers a data analytics product suite called Scintilla, and Kroger has a similar consumer insights platform called Stratum, which it runs through its loyalty program data business, Kroger Precision Marketing.
“Those are incredibly rich data sets that help us understand customers,” Castro said. “Marketers may see it as just purchase data, but there’s information about how customers shop and how they navigate and find products.”
Marketers typically haven’t searched these data sets for insights as often as they could because brand teams and strategists usually lack the technical know-how to navigate data fields, Castro added.
The advent of AI has lessened this problem, however, as marketers have been able to deploy agents to mine data reports and translate consumer insights into plain language. Tinuiti has been developing agents internally so it can navigate a variety of retail media spaces and program the tech to weigh first-party data more heavily than third-party sources or information coming from the open web.
Having tech that can navigate different retail data sets is key, as marketers still struggle to stitch together reports from different providers to create a coherent picture of their consumer base.
Retail networks are attempting to simplify their complexity, particularly for mid-sized and small brands. Last Tuesday, Kroger Precision Marketing launched an in-house team that will help marketers with off-site programmatic advertising across audio, connected TV and dynamic creative optimization for display ads. The managed-service offering will also include retail media measurement.
“It shouldn’t be that difficult for a brand to run what they need to run in the spaces where their audiences are,” said Christine Foster, senior VP of Commercial Strategy and Operations at 84.51°, the retail analytics subsidiary of Kroger.
“There are a lot of mid-sized brands and teams that don’t have the expertise to activate self-service programmatic on their own,” added Brian Spencer, Marketing Director of Kroger Precision Marketing. “This layer of managed service is really about helping those smaller teams and brands tap into retail data they haven’t been able to work with before.”
What Brands Can Learn From Health Data
Marketers can learn a lot about a consumer by looking at the health data they’ve opted into sharing with health tracking companies, said Kevin Dunn, Senior VP of Brands and Agencies at Liveramp. Health data can inform the types of foods, sleep products, clothes and even beauty products a person likes. It can also reveal social conditions that may affect their health, like their job, income, education or neighborhood.
“When you think about building a whole consumer profile, those social determinants of health are a big part of that profile,” Dunn said. “They naturally fit into what a person buys, what they do and where they spend their time. Does a person just buy items through an AI agent or take their time to go to a health company’s website? Marketers need to know this information to paint the story that continues to make a person feel loyal to that brand.”
There are risks to using this data, however. For one, it typically does not come packaged in the same ways that other marketing data does, making it difficult to slot into consumer behavior modeling environments. Certain kinds of healthcare data are also protected under privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which may intimidate marketers, Dunn said.
He pointed to the importance of having clean rooms to handle information like health data.
“A health data collection company might be very interested in sharing a lot of the signals that their things collect, but it doesn’t want to share them with certain kinds of AI agents,” he said. “Having the ability to control when and how your data is shared is the advancement that’s going to make it possible for marketers to use so many more signals.”
Pulling Consumer Insights From Creator Marketing
Marketers need no convincing about the value of creators. Bullish brands are increasing spend year after year. U.S. annual spend on influencers is now projected to climb from $7.3 billion in 2023 to $13.7 billion by 2027, with the overarching creator economy expected to reach $480 billion by 2027. Companies such as Unilever, which plans to increase its influencer marketing spend twentyfold and allocate half of its total ad spend to social media, are leading the charge.
Creator marketing measurement is still in its growing stages, but early efforts already yield valuable consumer insights that go unnoticed, said Jen Hansen, Head of Data and Analytics at Connelly Partners. Earlier this year, the independent agency discovered that creators can share organic and paid performance data directly with their agency and brand partners on Meta by clicking into advanced settings and toggling branded content before posting.
This toggle sometimes gets ignored due to perceptions that social media algorithms deprioritize branded content. By forgoing proper tagging, creators lose the option to share performance data within the platform. Instead, they have often shared screenshots of posts and dashboards, or brands have paid third-party influencer analytics companies to relay performance information.
Accessing this information directly within Meta is both cheaper and faster, and has allowed Connelly Partners to make timely creative decisions. For one client, seeing Halloween-related content perform well in early July informed the decision to launch campaigns tied to the holiday ahead of the brand’s typical schedule.
“We’re starting to watch what our data is doing and then change the behavior of our marketing,” Hansen said. “Instead of that client waiting and holding content, we saw that the market was ready for it and we launched it.”
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