Former Thinkbox research director David Brennan, now working as a consultant to advertising analytics firm Adalyser discusses the potential for data and the current media landscape.

We’ve had two big media announcements this week which might seem unrelated but are more significant than they might appear for all of the same reasons. In the same 24 hours, we have had Eric Schmidt’s overtures to the broadcast industry as well as Channel 4’s announced restructure around their ‘viewer relationship management’ strategy.

Now, I’m old enough to remember when a restructure around viewer relationships management would mean a redundancy in the programme complaints department but times are a’ changing. The fact that Gill Whitehead, C4’s director of audience technologies and insight (gulp!)sits on the executive board shows how committed C4 are to this strategy; ITV have also publicly stated the value of data within their plans and BSkyB have practically built a business around it!

As a research geek, I should be getting really excited about the data opportunities that are beginning to shape our business, but I’m also a tad reticent. Because there’s no shortage of data out there, we’re often drowning in it, seeing it used like a drunk uses a lamppost; for support rather than enlightenment.

When I joined Thinkbox in 2006, Mark Howe of Google was already pointing out the strong relationship between search and television and urging his clients to get the most out of it. The fact it has taken so long for many advertisers to get there is because, traditionally, search has been data-driven and TV (both programming and advertising) has been based on more ‘intuitive’ influences. So, the two sides have often talked different languages. Quant vs. Qual. Digital vs analogue. Analytics vs insight.

Except these aren’t battles for supremacy (although many have pitched it that way), these are complementary forces, like a tablet and a television set. Together, they are more than the sum of the individual parts,  it’s just taken us a long time to realise it. But it’s starting to get interesting now, and whether you’re involved in effectiveness planning or evaluation, the insight is starting to enable us to make increasing sense of the data. I’ve been working with Adalyser recently, helping them to tap into these opportunities, and the data gets addictive. But it only works when we look beyond the data itself, understanding the human motivations and emotions behind it. I genuinely believe that is the reason why Google have struggled so much in the TV arena; a ‘what do you want?’ approach simply doesn’t work.

Until recently, search was seen as a vastly more efficient response vehicle than other media and it was only when we realised it worked far less effectively without a TV campaign we began to realise attribution was more complex than we’d realised; just because a media channel (online/search)harvests a response doesn’t mean it created that response. Sounds simple now but it was undetected five years ago. Now we have systems like Adalyser’s to work that data hard.

Until now, I think most people had assumed Google’s main interest in TV was in its content and its audiences, but I think Mr Schmidt sees something more. I think he’s seen at first hand just how readily people respond to TV, trust it and interact with it in their millions and he sees this as a potential data goldmine, in its quantity but also in its quality. It is different to the type of data that Google harvests, because it comes from a different place and is based on different influences. But if we can generate TV-sourced data and synch it with the wealth of data Google holds, then true advertising effectiveness data is there for us all to employ and exploit. It makes TV more powerful and it turbo-charges search. Everybody’s happy...and Gill Whitehead and her team will have plenty of data to keep them busy.