Tag: Data

Singapore – In order to aid the influx of businesses that are now slowly opening up due to easing pandemic restrictions, data and artificial intelligence company ADA has launched a new dashboard that features data-driven insights on the changing consumer behavior in Southeast Asia and South Asia, widely disrupted by COVID-19.

Said index, called ‘The Recovery Index’, leverages ADA’s in-house data management platform, XACT, and was built with anonymized data sourced from millions of mobile devices and apps. While not a traditional economic indicator, businesses can use the dashboard to guide their decision-making by observing consumers’ mobility and digital consumption in near real-time.

Users of the dashboard, which is free to access, can drill down from the regional view to the national and state-level in eight countries, namely Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

A sample screenshot of ADA’s ‘The Recovery Index’

Some of the notable insights lifted off the index as of September 22 include countries in the Southeast Asian region, where for instance, the Philippines where footfall at malls and F&B outlets had recovered fully in June this year before declining to 70% of pre-COVID levels currently following a recent shift in lockdown policies in Manila.

In Indonesia’s case mobility has recovered more quickly in Java where Jakarta is located compared to surrounding islands. Footfall at F&B outlets has climbed to 110% of pre-COVID levels while footfall at malls has fully recovered. Usage of business and productivity apps, however, has collapsed to 60% of pre-COVID levels, even as usage of fitness apps has surged to 140%.

Lastly, in Malaysia, the main economic hub of Klang Valley is leading the recovery vis-a-vis other corridors in the Peninsula and the Bornean states. The recent easing of lockdown measures has seen footfall in malls jump to 130% of pre-COVID levels, even as road density and other mobility indicators are yet to fully recover.

For Srinivas Gattamneni, chief executive officer at ADA, part of the reason the dashboard was released was in response with the COVID-19 pandemic that has caused to business and to consumers, affecting them how they shop, where they go, and what they do on a daily basis.

“We created this dashboard as a resource for businesses to make sense of and respond to the ‘new normal’ in consumer behavior. The dashboard can serve as a guide to what has changed pre- and post-pandemic in terms of shopping, app usage, and mobility, allowing marketers to pivot their customer acquisition and retention strategies in an environment that continues to be volatile,” Gattamneni stated.

London, United Kingdom – With the eventual ‘death’ of third-party data in favor of privacy-centric advertising strategies, global location-based programmatic advertising company Blis puts focus on this dilemma businesses in the future may face by launching a global campaign that likens this ‘data drought’ to an actual drought in real life.

The campaign, which features Blis’ CEO Gregor Isbister, demonstrates the metaphor of being alone in the desert during a drought is aligned with the fact that businesses should migrate as soon as possible with advertising strategies with privacy at its core, unless they wait to be affected by the changes on data-centric advertising.

Furthermore, Blis demonstrates that businesses can ‘escape’ this ‘drought’ by implying privacy-centric ad strategies, including their commercial message of location-powered behavioral data that can provide marketers and media planners with real-world behavior data.

Other messages include location data that can help brands understand the real purchase journey and through an interactive and visual tool that combines data from the company’s global panel with precise location data and anonymized rich third-party signals, discovering and activating audiences is quick and easy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya42f6Z3gtw&t=1s

“The scarcity of data in the post-cookie world does not remove the ability to engage and connect with your digital audience. Brands can still reach their online prospects at scale via privacy-compliant personalized advertising. Even though at Blis we work in the B2B space, we are still marketing to people, and especially during this exceptional time in history, we want to engage our audiences and leave them with a positive and memorable impression, by speaking to them not as robots, but as actual real humans with needs and wants,” Ed Burleigh, head of marketing for Asia at Blis shared to MARKETECH APAC.

When asked why they used the metaphor of a drought in the desert to represent the campaign, Burleigh stated that the desert is an ‘extreme metaphor’ for what may happen when cookies disappear entirely from the digital advertising ecosystem, adding also the new landscape where Apple’s ID for Advertisers (IDFA) update eliminates ad tracking.

“In the desert, there are limited options to survive. However, Blis believes by applying the power of location data, and a myriad of rich and anonymized data signals, brands can reach the right people at the right time. We know that marketers are concerned about the removal of the Chrome cookie. However, we believe a data drought can be avoided,” he stated.

Burleigh added, “We’ve done this by addressing a key industry issue – that is facing all of us – with a sense of clever playfulness. One way we’ve achieved this is by putting a face on the brand, which is a great way to humanize it. Our new company video features our CEO Greg as the lead ‘character’ on a personal journey to beat the data drought. It’s authentic, believable, and fun.”

Singapore – The Coca-Cola Company, the global beverage company that owns the world-famous beverage brands Coke and Sprite as well as a portfolio of hydration, nutrition, juice, and dairy, and sports, and coffee and tea brands, has appointed media, digital, and analytics veteran Anupama Biswas as its new senior director for its Analytics & Insights team in the APAC region. 

The appointment comes as the company progresses on a major strategic transformation, including rewiring to become a more networked organization. Biswas will become part of a new team called Platform Services and will be leading the company’s analytics and insights for four operating units in the APAC region. 

Biswas brings with her almost two decades of experience in media, digital, e-commerce, and analytics, and business strategy across leading consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive. Her expertise includes combining data-driven insights, creativity, and pragmatism to develop organizational alignment, focus, and a clear path to growth. 

Biswas most recently comes from Kellogg Company as its regional director for e-commerce, media, and analytics in the AMEA region. In her last assignment, she has implemented digital transformation and drove change management within the organization by building in-house digital & analytics capabilities.

Meanwhile, her experience on the agency side has had her working particularly with GroupM agencies, such as Maxus, which is now Wavemaker, and also Mindshare. For a little over a decade, she was with MediaCom in its Singapore team. 

In an interview with MARKETECH APAC, Biswas shared that her role will be focusing on delivering actionable insights to drive business growth. The specific areas she will be handling will be commercial in nature, such as consumer segmentation and revenue growth management. 

Biswas shared that over the near term, her responsibilities would be more focused on building a team and on building the analytics framework, while over the long run, the goal would be to make the jump from descriptive analytics to more predictive and prescriptive solutions.

“I am super excited to be at The Coca-Cola Company. This is a company that I have always admired and it’s a privilege to be here. I look forward to driving a data culture and unlocking analytical solutions to deliver actionable insights to further fuel business growth,” said Biswas. 

Meanwhile, Alex Clarke, the global head for Analytics & Insights at Coca-Cola, and to whom Biswas will be reporting, commented, “We are thrilled that someone with the talent and experience of Anu has chosen to join the Coca-Cola Analytics & Insights team. This is an exciting time to join our company as we step-change how we leverage analytics and data science to support our growth ambitions. Anu will play a key role in the region in helping us achieve our goal of being a truly data-driven organization.”

Manila, Philippines – At a time when there is stronger imperative for brands to deliver data-driven brand experiences and campaigns, global advertising agency network dentsu in the Philippines has announced a new leadership movement within its data department – the elevation of Roki Ferrer, its former Connections Strategy and Research Lead, to now assume the role of Head of Data. 

The network’s Filipino team said that the new leadership is in line with its goal of keeping the agency’s commitment to delivering ideas-led, data-driven, and tech-enabled work. 

The appointment of Ferrer commences with immediate effect and will report directly to dentsu Philippines’ CEO, JC Catibog. 

Ferrer is a marketing and communications expert who boasts over 16 years of experience in brand management, corporate communications, and integrated marketing communications, as well as connections planning experience. His foundation of business understanding and campaign management can be seen through the success of the campaigns he had worked on as a client marketer. 

These campaigns include work for Coca-Cola, Globe Telecom, and SkinWhite. In the past five years, he has worked on the agency side and widened his perspectives of different planning tools, frameworks, and approaches to deliver custom solutions in solving complex business problems for both local and global brands

Catibog said that during Ferrer’s stay with the agency, which started in 2019, he has enabled the team to become thought-leaders in the realm of consumer and media by spearheading webinars, media bulletins, and bespoke research consultancies, most especially in the pandemic, where insight-building activities surfaced “new truths.”

“Roki’s marketing acumen and knowledge of the power of data will sharpen consumer understanding of our clients and future-proof the agency to unlock audience identity solutions, solutions that help navigate challenges in the digital world,” said Catibog.

For his new role, Roki will be expanding his strategy and research remit to equip and accelerate the data offering of dentsu Philippines and create business value through data services and products for clients.

Ferrer himself commented, “People-based marketing is the way forward and data will be the spine that bridges brands closer to the ever-evolving consumer beliefs, dispositions, and behaviors.” 

“I am looking forward to working with the team to deliver next-generation data products as we evolve our proprietary audience panel and planner, and find key technology and media partnerships to build new platforms. It is definitely an exciting time for dentsu,” he added. 

I remember going through a monthly stock report that described my investment portfolio. There were layers of data to it and more. My mind drifted for a second and the thought just caught me in a jiffy. I was bored! The report was great, per se. It told me everything about the ‘what’. But it still left me wondering about the ‘why’. It was number-heavy and gave me cognitive nausea.

I find this quite standard with data that is trying to tell stories. It doesn’t really tell a story at all, in most use-cases! It is often detached, leaving the reader dulled. Just like this report left me.

Hard-wired for stories

We are humans! We are hard-wired to register stories because we have an innate tendency to make sense of things around us. That is how we have evolved. That is how our communication cultures evolved, around the world. We tailor our message to the person we are talking to, including oneself, to share the ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘when’ along with the ‘what’.

Then why are research processes and outcomes still laden with just data and negligible human perspective?

Despite the recent advancement in data-led solutions for businesses, there are many hidden opportunities to cultivate a storytelling culture. Data is not just numbers and charts. These lack the component of a narrative for communicating insights, and the reason is overemphasis on tools and analytics that make scaling of information to the masses difficult. Most teams working on data also often do not have the resources to present insights in a way that makes it an advantage. The language and format it is shared in often lacks a customized connection and tonality.

Stories – they strike a chord!

What could be a great way to understand the actual context behind why something is selling or bombing? Delineating personalized statistics of consumer experience with a product, for instance, immediately shows how much impact it has made on one’s life. Global diaper brand Huggies’s ‘No Baby Unhugged’ campaign utilized the power of data-storytelling to increase sales by 30%. Why? It struck a chord with the masses. More and more brands are repurposing data to reach the last mile to get real actionable insights.

Data has become inadvertently critical to innovative solutions across the board. But it has to be amplified with a narrative to drive impact.

Value of insights

LinkedIn recently reported that data analysis is one of the most sought-after job categories. Data has made amazing changes to our lives in the past decades, making us better prepared for informed decisions. And that is the science of it. Experts who are magicians with tech, tools, and tally. But I am piqued about the ‘tale’, both as an entrepreneur and a consumer.

What makes you sign up for a survey and why? Why do you enjoy ads on TV? Do you want to watch a movie without a great story? With more and more channels serving content now, which brands do you think stand out and create a recall for themselves?

From paintings hung in museums to fiction novels to sci-fi movies, stories are epicentral to sensemaking. Data science simply presents facts but stories provide context, which augments the value of insights.

Context for real change

Data-based storytelling is a powerful, yet, underutilized method of marketing. Consumers prefer to learn about a brand through content, especially visual. Hence, stories make up at least 65% of the content today. The psychology of storytelling engages more parts of the brain, making the story, and its elements, easier to recall.

Companies are deploying more AI-led natural language generation technology. While we try to develop products – we put the context of the problem we are trying to solve and the psychology of the audience we are trying to cater to at the crux. This makes communication simpler and uncomplicated – to tell stories with data, not just present facts. Weaving language in a way that is tailored to our consumer’s needs, we employ data as proof points to convey insights and give it a voice.

Data storytelling has the power to shape values, determine preferences, and influence our aspirations. Collecting, engineering, and delivering data is a skill, no doubt, but leveraging it from insight-to-value to communicate true understanding of stories hidden in it, is an art. And this is what brings real change. Any PaaS company that is committed to an end-to-end, real-time data integration and analytics platform, will transform data into optimized relationships to bridge gaps between data, insights, and action.

This article is written by Monalisa Saxena, COO of Merren.

Singapore – Despite the critical importance of data in businesses, nearly all of business leaders in Asia Pacific admit to be challenged in using them to their advantage in creating significant business decisions, new data from a survey from data integration company Talend.

According to the global survey, 96% of APAC respondents admit to such practice, while 76% of APAC respondents admit to using it everyday, and 35% of APAC respondents admit to not using data for their business decisions.

Such practice of data usage is best manifested in the behavior of the respondents in dealing with creating data deliverables based on the saturation of data, as 45% of APAC respondents are able to create timely deliverables. For Tabled, there is a stark difference between data-saturated and data-driven. Companies have more access to data than ever before, but there’s very little way to make sense of it. Data management companies have been offering to solve these problems for years — but they’re focused on the mechanics of data like moving it and storing it.

Christal Bemont, CEO at Talend, notes that most business leaders’ relationships are deemed ‘unhealthy’, considering the fact that only 45% of APAC business leaders trust the data they are working with, and 35% of APAC respondents say that they are still making decisions based on gut instincts.

“The reality of data is falling well short of the industry’s vision. Data management, which largely focuses on moving and storing data, doesn’t take into account the overall health of data. Therefore, in trying to manage data, all companies are creating digital landfills of corporate information. This has to change. Our vision of data health is the future because it recognizes the fundamental standards that are critical for corporate survival,” Bemont explains.

In terms of data health, Talend also revealed that 13% of APAC respondents do not think that their company’s investments in data management is worth it, and 40% of APAC respondents report that there are no standards for data quality at their company.

Despite the negative light, 75% of APAC respondents state that they would like to make the majority of their decisions based on data.

Meanwhile, in terms of corporate objective, factors such as decreasing operation cost (40% of APAC respondents), monitoring performance (71% of APAC respondents), customer experience improvement (76% of APAC respondents) and increasing revenue (53% of APAC respondents) are driving forces to push APAC business leaders into utilizing significant data.

To drive such data use among APAC executives, factors such as ensuring data quality (56% of APAC respondents), making data available to the right person (47% of APAC respondents), ample skilled resources (52% of APAC respondents), and meeting security and compliance standards (49% of APAC respondents) must be met to ensure smooth process of data utilization.

Around 97% of APAC respondents agree to a certain extent that there should be cross-industry standard metrics to assess the quality of all enterprise data.

Interestingly, Talend noted that globally, sales and marketing teams are the least data-driven departments, as nearly half of sales and marketing executives (48%) make the majority of their decisions without data. Meanwhile, the finance department follows closely with 44% of finance executives reporting that they make the majority of their decisions without relying on data.

Hong Kong – Uber Eats in Hong Kong has expanded to Tsing Yi, an island in the urban area of Hong Kong.

Elisa Janiec, general manager of Uber Eats Hong Kong, said that they are thrilled to introduce Uber Eats to Tsing Yi, as they believe that delicious food is a convenience that everyone across Hong Kong should enjoy.

“My team and I are committed to investing with our partners and the F&B community to unlock more innovative and delightful food choices for Hong Kongers,” said Janiec.

The island Tsing Yi is packed with eateries and food stores. Uber Eats will be bringing a line-up of local favorites such as local cha chaan teng from Bun Hui Cafe or Daniel’s Restaurant, Chiu Chow deli from Yummy Yummy, and chicken pot from Luk Kee, among others. All-time favorites are also available, such as Saizeriya Italian Restaurant, Nam Kee, Tamjai, and Bafang Dumpling. Meanwhile, as food delivery grew to become an integral part of Hong Kongers’ daily lives amid limited physical contact, Uber Eats has observed a shift in its users’ eating habits. 

Hong Kong recently celebrated 2021’s stay-at-home Chinese New Year holiday last February 12 to 16, and during the celebration, Uber Eats recorded a 50% year-on-year increase in order volume. 

Furthermore, as Hong Kongers further adapts to the new normal, the food delivery platform has observed an 800% increase in healthy food orders during the dine-in restriction periods, as people are ordering more from vegan, vegetarian-friendly, and healthy restaurants available on the app. Another consumer behavior shows on Uber Eats’ data, where Hong Kongers are starting supper at 6:00 pm, and are generally ordering 22% more food items to enjoy with their family in the comfort of their own home, which employees rarely do before the new work-from-home set-up.

Singapore – France-based ad-tech company Criteo has announced its third Japan-based data center based in the capital city of Tokyo, and aims to follow the rule on corporate responsibility by making its newest data center equipped to standards of green-based energy.

Upon migration, the Japan market will be the company’s largest data center within the APAC region. Being the largest market outside of the United States, the company aims to diversify its reach within the North Asia region, particularly in Japan and Korea.

Aside from being equipped with the company’s basic services for premium ad services and inventories, the newest data center’s facilities are based on using less power and less CO2 emissions. Features such as 25Gbps connection interfaces, faster and large servers are some of the new inclusions in the new green-based data center.

“Criteo is conscious of its environmental footprint and our IT infrastructure team has always had this in mind as we look at improving our data centers. By using leading technology combined with sustainable practices, our powerful data centers around the world can support up to 2.8 trillion bid requests per week, evaluate over 64 million campaigns per second, and accumulate 700 TB data per day,” said Diarmuid Gill, Criteo’s chief technology officer. 

In a statement, Megan Clarken, chief executive officer at Criteo stated that the company’s newest data center launch is in response also with the positive growth of the ad industry in Japan.

“Rapid increases have been noted for transactions of programmatic ads and Real-Time Bidding (RTB). We continue to diversify our solutions and invest in upgrading our infrastructure and R&D to provide better service and performance to our clients. As a green-energy based data center, it demonstrates our commitment to being a socially responsible company, caring for our environment and society,” Clarken stated.