Amazon’s race to capitalize on data

Published in

DataScan

3 min readJul 9, 2018

Connected data and people-based marketing. Data breach exposes personal info database with 340m records. Ways to think about machine learning.

All included in this week’s data digest. 👇🏼

Jeff Bezos and Amazon have the advertising industry looking over its shoulder. Claire Atkinson describes how Amazon’s growing advertising business is poised to challenge the Google/Facebook digital ads duoplay:

Google knows what consumers are interested in, and Facebook knows who you are. But Amazon has what many in the advertising industry regard as the most important piece of the puzzle: what people buy. And the e-commerce giant is starting to capitalize on that data in a big way.

Also, other advertisers should be wary around data sharing:

For advertisers, the short-term opportunity that Amazon offers is offset by the realization that they could be providing the company with the data and market power it needs to eventually run them out of business.
Advertisers that spend money to display their products on Amazon’s search page give up data about their customers in return for sales, but those same marketers are also helping Amazon build a better mousetrap by learning more about customer intent.

Connected data and people-based marketing. Martech Today contributor Jose Cebrian explains how technology that connects customer data is enabling truly people-based marketing → “marketing to the exact right person at the exact right time”. Cebrian states that adopting a “combined martech and adtech approach” enables marketers to create meaningful and unique customer experiences on any platform. For example:

Various combinations of martech and ad tech platforms — using a data management platform (DMP) in conjunction with a customer data platform (CDP), for instance — allow marketers to most efficiently take action.
By leveraging customer insights with media and ad buys, marketers get the most value from their connected data and unlock the financial and brand affinity benefits associated with people-based marketing.

Gartner’s Lizzy Foo Kune cuts the truth from the hype around CDPs:

It’s important to remember that CDPs aren’t a replacement for existing enterprise systems of record. Instead, marketers should consider a CDP to be an extension of those systems that can help to unlock the value of data to reach marketing objectives.
In order for this investment to live up to the ultimate goal of creating a unified, single customer view, the technology must be well integrated and it must adhere to a governance plan.

Marketing and data aggregation firm Exactis leaked a personal info database with 340 million records. That is, potentially, the personal information of almost every American adult, stored on a publicly accessible server. Furthermore:

Aside from the sheer breadth of the Exactis leak, it may be even more remarkable for its depth: Each record contains entries that go far beyond contact information and public records to include more than 400 variables on a vast range of specific characteristics: whether the person smokes, their religion, whether they have dogs or cats, and interests as varied as scuba diving and plus-size apparel.

→ Ticketmaster, Adidas and Fortum & Mason have also recently experienced data breaches.