CEO Connection: Data, Analytics and Distribution

In my last blog post, I discussed how data combined with analytics can have a huge impact on markets and industries.  I cited several examples of companies who leveraged data and analytics to create differentiation for themselves at a time in their business when markets were very competitive. This is a similar situation to what we see in online advertising today.

Those companies actually did more than just utilize data and analytics; they also created ways to distribute this knowledge—that was the key. The ability to distribute the analytics and put it into operation is how you scale the power of these technologies. 

The credit score example provides an interesting analogy here. Imagine I am a banker and every day I have the means to produce a report on my 5 million customers that tells me how their risk profile has changed in the last 3 months.  While the report itself is insightful, manually making a decision about credit limits and then trying to manually implement that decision for 5 million customers is really not feasible. 

What I really need is a way to automatically adjust credit limits so I can see the benefits of increased profits on interest from increased limits and reduction of loses on reduced limits.  The solution to this problem requires that I assemble the data, build models that suggest credit limits, deploy a set of rules around how those limits are applied, then implement all these findings into the consumers transaction flow  in as near real-time as systems will allow. Sound complicated? Well it is.

Advertising is no different. Inuvo, through our various businesses, collects a wealth of data—consumer-interest data, marketing-performance data, website-traffic data, website-characteristics data, geographical data and much of it is transactional in nature.  Collecting the data itself, let alone building models on it, requires sophisticated technology. However, without the means to put this information into operation, the promise of increased return on investment (ROI) for clients, and for Inuvo, becomes a vision unrealized.

Over the last quarter, Inuvo has been working on the data collection and data analysis phases of this challenge. We are now past the point where we know, based on our data, that advertising effectiveness can be enhanced, so we are focusing now on how to put these learnings into production. 

This is where the Inuvo Platform comes into play.  One way to look at the Inuvo Platform is to see it as a giant database of marketing transactions between an advertiser and any entity that has the means to drive leads to that advertiser. If as soon as a lead came in we had the means to adapt the advertising offer to suit, one might be able to improve the number of times each of those leads actually purchases a product. It’s the difference between being interested in a product (a lead) and actually buying that product (a sale).

Small changes in performance between a lead and sale can have huge impacts on performance.  One million leads for a $30 dollar product where this kind of analytic improvement changes the sales rate from 1% (10,000 sales) to 3% (30,000 sales) takes sales from $300K to $900K.  Do it for a company like Apple, and you are talking billions of dollars!

So how will our data and analytics be applied or distributed?  How will our analytics reach the market and create value for Inuvo and our clients?  Well, as suggested above, through the Inuvo Platform.  The Platform is an environment where our data and analytics can have an impact on the performance of merchant campaigns.   When you think about it, the Inuvo Platform is really a highly intelligent ad serving platform that could distribute and track advertising across a variety of media sources. Online websites, wireless devices, email—perhaps even book readers or direct response television!

Today the primary source of media inventory for our merchants is our affiliates or online publishers.  Tomorrow the source of media inventory could be any of those mentioned above. Integrating these additional sources of media inventory into the Inuvo Platform provides a conduit for the distribution of our intelligence, which in turn, provides a means to make more money for our clients and media suppliers. This is what the scientists and developers of Inuvo are working on.

Marketers want to find an audience for their products; publishers and media access providers want to align products to their audience. When the right offer is served to the right audience, both marketer and publisher benefit.   The Inuvo Platform brings together data, analytics and distribution to deliver the perfect storm for performance (i.e. based on an action) marketing. A place where the right offer gets delivered to the right consumer through the right channel at the right time.

Bringing together data and analytics reveals some very interesting and predictive patterns. Combining data and analytics with distribution provides the means to make money from the intelligence.