Data-driven marketing has never been simple, but lately it’s gotten downright messy.
As the digital landscape evolves with aspirations for a better, safer online experience for consumers via new privacy restrictions and regulations, marketing itself is being turned upside down — forcing brands to rework their campaign playbooks and scramble for access to compliant sources of validated data. And mixed signals from major players — including Google, which surprised the industry with its July announcement that it wouldn’t be killing off Chrome cookies after all — certainly haven’t helped. (It now seems that cookies will effectively self-deprecate — go away on their own over time — given that Google says it plans to let consumers opt out of them.)
But maybe there’s an upside to this mess. Because, let’s face it, cookies were always an imperfect solution, and all the noise surrounding data-acquisition channels has revealed just maddeningly siloed consumer data has become. When data can’t be connected and contextualized across the omnichannel spectrum, marketers struggle to develop a deeper understanding of who they’re talking to.
So, think of this moment — call it the Great Data Upheaval — as a golden opportunity to break bad marketing habits and pivot to more accurate, effective and sustainable sources of consumer data.
For starters, it’s time to pivot from device-centric marketing to people-based marketing.
The path to that new paradigm? The household.
That’s the message at the core of “Home is where the data is,” a new (free, downloadable) guide from Quad Insights. Simply put, the household can become the new center of gravity for collecting, connecting and using behavioral and demographic data.
A consumer’s home address is what Quad calls the “resilient identifier” in omnichannel marketing. While digital identifiers change over time, home addresses can bring stability and consistency to your audience-targeting capabilities.
“Each consumer’s day starts and ends at the home,” says Joolee Bouton, VP of Product Marketing at Quad. “By starting with household-centric addressable data, we can reach audiences throughout their day and across different media channels, including in-store and online. We can understand their passions and continuously connect with them throughout their journey.”
By leveraging the household as a resilient identifier, data addressability can give marketers access to a new ecosystem of options for finding and engaging their target audience. The goal is to begin with information available at the household level and match it with additional consumer data points gleaned from other channels, including digital and social, as well as transactional activity. The sum is a more complete portrait of what consumers care about, how they act and where they can be reached.
To put that another way, the household serves as a core identifier where consumer passions and interests can be connected to an individual consumer. A key part of that key identifier: the types of physical mail consumers receive, which can inform a deeper understanding of them to guide more relevant marketing engagements.
“Household data is valuable because it’s built upon self-declared interests and passions,” says Joshua Lowcock, President of Quad Media. “If you pay money to subscribe to a running magazine, you’re interested in running. We start with a single source of truth, which is the home. Then we find the person and then we attach interests and passions back to the home.”
Another advantage of household-centric data: It covers the vast majority of U.S. consumers. The data in Quad’s data stack touches 89% of all U.S. households and 78% of the total U.S. population. (By comparison, 68% of U.S. adults say they use Facebook even occasionally, according to the Pew Research Center.) Across any given 18-month period, Quad’s data stack contains more than 3 billion validated/revalidated data points to anchor addressability for any marketer targeting any consumer segment.
For marketers whose data-marketing strategies may have been blown off course amidst the Great Data Upheaval, consumer data that’s anchored to a tangible reality — the household — changes everything.
Want to learn more about leveraging household addressability? Download “Home is where the data is” from Quad Insights today.
