Dive Brief:
- The Interactive Advertising Bureau's Data Center of Excellence has released the IAB Data Maturity Model, a benchmarking system for brands, agencies, publishers, and data technology vendors to better understand how they and their clients rank in data usage sophistication.
- As part of the data maturity model, the IAB put out a white paper, “Data Maturity Model for Digital Advertising,” and created a website with four checklists for self-evaluation, one each for publishers, agencies, data providers and brands.
- The checklists cover four key areas within the data lifecycle: data collection, data processing, data activation and organizational readiness. After taking the checklist, users are presented with a score indicating their level of data maturity as well as insights into improving data maturity
Dive Insight:
Understanding where organizations rank in terms of data is useful because it can and should impact technology implementation and strategy.
“Sophisticated digital data collection and usage provides a competitive advantage in today’s digital media and advertising marketplace,” said Patrick Dolan, Executive Vice President and COO, IAB, in a statement. “This model is a tool that industry leaders can use to help unlock the value of their data.”
Given the importance of data in today’s digital marketing world, the IAB’s data maturity tool should be a valuable addition for all industry players, especially since the IAB is offering a self-scoring online checklist tool specifically geared toward different participants to simplify the benchmarking process.
At best, marketers are doing a "fair" job of handling the explosion of data in the space today, according to research from the DMA. The study found only about one-third of marketers feel they have a good grasp of dealing with data.
"This is a cry for help from the marketing community," Neil O'Keefe, SVP of CRM and member engagement at the DMA, told Marketing Dive about the results of the study. "This is the future of marketing and the future is now. More marketers are searching our education to better train existing staff and DMA hears from hiring managers that more and more their target hire is a data scientist and not a marketer."