How Data Will Shape Marketing in 2023
What matters: While data will persist in shaping our world in 2023, data itself isn’t the end goal—it’s how you use it that facilitates growth.
It’s no surprise that data will become an unequivocally critical component for brands and marketers in the foreseeable future.
Some contend 2022 was a tumultuous year for marketers, for no shortage of reasons. Emerging platforms, the stop-and-start of metaverse activations, Web3, social commerce and the creator economy, and the retail media frenzy all played a part in what felt like a chaotic twelve months for brands. And all this was set against a backdrop of the economic realities of inflationary pressures, low consumer confidence and marketers feeling the squeeze while navigating a multitude of challenges.
2023 will surely present its own set of challenges, but what’s clear is that amidst all the new technologies, channels, behaviors and consumer expectations, data will play an increasingly important role in the year to come. Below are four ways data will shape marketing in 2023.
FIRST-PARTY DATA WILL CONTINUE TO TAKE CENTER STAGE
Google’s news of the deprecation of the third-party cookie sounded an alarm for digital marketing and media that continued to ring in 2022. And while the cookieless future got postponed to 2024 (providing some relief, and possibly hope, for panicked niches of the digital ecosystem), brands and advertisers began to think more about how to shift their strategies and stay top-of-mind—and in front of—their customers. But it wasn’t just cookies. Apple’s rollout of its App Tracking Transparency policy added fuel to the fire and left some corners of digital marketing scrambling.
These widespread changes and their forthcoming impacts sent first-party data to the front of the queue for brands and marketing executives, opting to take a page from large retailers, travel brands and others whose customer relationship marketing and loyalty programs have been generating transactional and customer data on which to action for decades. First- and zero-party data was no longer a nice-to-have in one’s marketing arsenal. Instead, it became a mission-critical marketing asset.
If 2022 saw the necessity of first-party data come into focus, 2023 will be the year where it becomes much more clearly defined. Some brands are already taking the initiative. Restaurant brands like Chipotle and Burger King have recently launched a series of brand activations that incentivize app downloads through partnerships, augmented reality and gamification to access exclusive offers and menu items and encourage loyalty program or even subscription enrollment by younger audiences. Other brands should take note.
AUDIENCE DATA AND INTELLIGENCE WILL EVOLVE
If first-party data was one side of the ‘cookie coin,’ the heightened emphasis on audience data and intelligence was arguably the other. One of the biggest ways this played out in 2022 was via the retail media network frenzy, where troves of customer data linked to large retailers formed the foundation of enormous, in-house media platforms that became both a significant source of revenue for some and a brand new (and perhaps shiny) channel for advertisers to tap into. Suddenly, brands large and small were able to marry their products with consumer preferences and behaviors in real time and at scale.
The same time that retail media networks ignited across the digital landscape, the streaming wars—and the ad-supported tiers that began to accompany them—began to heat up. Most notably, Netflix announced its first-ever ad tier to stem the attrition of subscribers and attract new viewers, offering lofty promises (and prices) to advertisers eager to unlock recently unavailable and precious customer data.
As more digital channels become available with ever more opportunities to deliver personalized experiences across streaming platforms, connected TV and video, 2023 will see continued focus on the importance, and perhaps, more importantly, the quality, of audience data, particularly as the fractional media landscape begins to take shape.
A SEISMIC PUSH TOWARD EFFICIENCY
With so much data available across an overabundance of channels, marketers will increasingly be required to prove effective use of ad spend on the back end. In what many predict to be a tight economy in 2023, brands and advertisers will need to make optimal use of dollars with harder-working campaigns and initiatives to meet their objectives with smaller budgets.
While measurement and attribution will come under heightened scrutiny among C-suite executives, optimization and testing into new or emerging technologies, channels and ideas will be critical for brands who are seeking to make strong strategic bets in the coming year—and action them with the right partners.
THE ARTIFICIAL ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
This final point may be less certain, but it undoubtedly has a place in 2023. Artificial intelligence tools in 2022 began to see gradual adoption and emergence among creatives, designers, technologists, engineers and writers in ways that were unthinkable five years ago.
Technology companies like OpenAI are actively charting a new path for artificial intelligence to enter our everyday lives. Even work lives in fact—as tech giants such as Microsoft are investing billions of dollars into the suddenly famous ChatGPT model, potentially paving the way for us to one day never again manage our calendars or respond to emails.
2023 will be the year in which AI usage begins to complement (not supplement) aspects of our work. Use cases for AI to impact the world of marketing abound. For some, it’s already eerily accurate—and mildly terrifying.
In the end, it’s no surprise that data will become an unequivocally critical component for brands and marketers in the foreseeable future. And while data will persist in shaping our world in this year in so many ways, data itself isn’t the end goal. It’s how you use it that facilitates growth. As an engineer once famously said: “Garbage in, garbage out.”
Andrew Kelly is Head of Marketing at Salient Global.