Deloitte Digital, the creative digital consultancy, is seeking to leverage “emotional datasets” that can help it develop stronger creative, and thus build deeper relationships and engagement with customers.

Alicia Hatch, CMO at Deloitte Digital, discussed this subject at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2018 Masters of Marketing Week.

“Humanising data allows us to become more human marketers,” she said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How Deloitte takes the terror out of data to tame information overload.)

As part of this process, the organisation is eager to identify the information that can connect data and creativity in meaningful ways.

“We actually need emotional datasets that will help us fully understand the power of creative [and] how we actually can build relationships with our customers and engage,” Hatch said.

And with that imperative comes the need to rely on science but also to translate the data findings into art – a fine balance for marketers to strike.

For example, Hatch proposed, “How can we use neuro-insight to dig into the subconscious reasons that [people] were watching a video for nine seconds instead of six?”

Similarly, taking account of a consumer’s physical context – where they were, what they were doing – at a given moment could let brand custodians “more deeply understand all the factors that were affecting their actions”.

Hatch revealed that, over the last couple of years, Deloitte Digital has been “really trying to rethink ways where we can actually make data and technology work for us”.

“We had a huge stack of technology and piles and piles of data. But it actually wasn’t very helpful; we had to look at how much of it was helping us to be better marketers.”

A first step: “Looking at the emotional context around all of those clicks and impressions to see how we could use natural language processing to really understand the emotions that people were experiencing as they were interacting with us.”

To accelerate the goal of humanised information, Hatch is participating in the CMO Growth Council, a body co-sponsored by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the Cannes Lions (a sister company of WARC).

More specifically, she is a member of two committees – “Data and Technology” and “Talent and Organisation” – that form part of the CMO Growth Council, which pledges to “lead disruption to drive growth through a global growth agenda”.

“This is a huge initiative,” Hatch said. “No, we are not done, but, already, it’s been inspiring for marketers to have better access to better data.”

Sourced from WARC