ANA Magazine - April 2012

of Firstborn, a digital agency in New York.

However, reacting nonstop to Twitter and Facebook posts runs the risk of your voice wandering so far off message that it will bear little resemblance to your display ads, providing consumers with a muddled image of your company.

“You have to resist the temptation to be like a hummingbird jumping from flower to flower and overreacting as you look at the data,” Speros says.

If the goal is to create integrated digital campaigns, data coming from multiple sources must be viewed holistically, and from a consumer-centric point of view. One reason marketers struggle to do this is the siloed nature of their organizations: if social media data is reported to one department while app usage data is reported elsewhere, your company is unlikely to take full advantage of the data.

Fidelity maintains a holistic view of its data by funneling it all to the same group. The firm’s marketers recently launched the second phase of its three-year-old Green Line campaign, an award-winning integrated effort that spans multiple digital and offline platforms.

Speros notes that the ability to corral information allows Fidelity to combine qualitative and quantitative data into a comprehensive whole. “We have a large analytics and insights group that manages all our data for us and is able to reach into just about any bucket of data within the company to pull together a story for us,” he says.

“They can look into social media data, the digital response rates on banners, and direct mail print response rates,” he points out. “We also do a lot of modeling work using the data and insights we gather.”

Turning Data into Action
It was through that kind of analysis that Fidelity first
developed its Green Line campaign in 2009. On
the heels of the financial collapse, Fidelity saw
strong evidence through its various channels that
even experienced investors were seeking guidance.

“THE DATA EXPLOSION IS ONE OF THE BIGGEST ISSUES MARKETERS HAVE TO DEAL WITH. THE DATA HAS BECOME SO VARIED AND VOLUMINOUS THAT IT CAN BE HARD TO DECIDE HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF IT ALL.”