Spot On Marketing Data & Insights, December 2018
 
 

Spot On Marketing Data & Insights

Ken Sonenclar, Oaklins’ Marketing Data & Insights specialist, explains why key industry players have their heads in cloud-based data technology, citing recent high-value acquisitions of data analytics startups as a strong indicator of the MD&I sector’s future direction. In the race to take advantage of technological changes in the data-to-insights ecosystem, companies built solely on traditional data sources risk becoming industry dinosaurs in MD&I’s rapid evolution.

We also look at why the addition of a fifth P to the traditional four Ps marketing model could prove critical for brand marketers and the marketing insight providers who drive their decision-making.

DEALS AS A LEADING INDICATOR OF MD&I’S FUTURE

Acquisitions and the inflow of capital provide strong indicators of the evolution of marketing data & insights (MD&I). For instance, Snowflake, a Software as a Service (SaaS) database-technology provider (underpinned by a novel high-performance SQL engine), was barely a blip on the radar 24 months ago, and yet has now raised more than US$900 million, almost half of which was achieved in October with a pre-money valuation of US$3.5 billion.

Snowflake is by no means the only datatechnology unicorn. October also saw the US$5.2 billion mega-merger of Cloudera and Hortonworks, while NASDAQ-quoted data integration tools provider Talend and non-SQL database technology company MongoDB achieved unicorn status — and the frenzy continues. Even more recently, MongoDB acquired cloud database provider mLab for US$68 million.

This is important when considering what is happening and will happen in the MD&I sector, because businesses in this sector are increasingly being built on data and analytics technology.

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