The panelists:
Kristina Prokop, Co-founder and CEO, Eyeota
Timur Yarnnall, Co-founder and CEO, Neutronian
Jene Elzie, Chief Growth Officer, Athletes First Partners
Michael Gorman, SVP Product, BusinessDevelopment & Marketing, Share This
In this last session, the panel glances into the future to highlight some of the emerging key trends in data management.
The tech regulatory spotlight has shifted recently, away from data privacy and ownership issues towards those aroundanti-trust and fake news. The public have been largely made aware of the issues and regulators have sought to address them. Now the industry can continue to move forward with perhaps less heated scandal and a more nuanced approach to regulation.
“There are generational differences inpeople’s attitudes to sharing data in order to access services,” says Eyeota’s Kristina Prokop. “The topic of privacy won’t go away but the stance will change periodically and as an industry, we have to get ahead of it.”
“Privacy will evolve into a mission-drivenmarketing model where consumers will ask themselves: What is the point of thisexchange? Where are we going, and do I agree with its purpose?” Timur Yarnell from Neutronian says.
As ‘cause marketing’ becomes more mainstream, Athlete First Partners’ Jene Elzie thinks that corporate socialresponsibility and marketing groups will come even closer together.
“Consumers want to know what their brand stands for, so marketers need to know that the quality of data is sufficient tounderstand what their audience is thinking about.”
The pandemic factor
The Covid crisis has undoubtedly accelerated digital transformation and forced companies to modernize and extract more information out of data.
New trends in consumer interest have emerged, such as health and hygiene, whereas travel has declined, and onlineretail has increased. Although peoples’ online behaviors have settled a bit more compared to earlier in the year, there is little doubt that a lot has changed since 2019.
“What isn’t changing,” says Prokop. “Is the discipline required to understand where spend is going and the quality of dataneeded to track new behaviors.”
“There has also been an acceleration of newcustomers for brands coming online and they are being driven there from manydifferent channels. Brands have to adapt to this,” she adds.
Jene Elzie agrees. “People are learning new skill sets and adopting new interests, so brands have to get new insights fromtheir data. Change is why it’s fun! And it’s exciting too!”