Has data killed the marketing campaign? That was the question put forth at the ADMA Data Day conference in Sydney this morning.

While Greg Nichelsen, head of customer insights and analytics at BT Financial Group, said it hadn’t quite snuffed it out, data has severely crippled it.

“I don’t think data necessarily has killed the marketing campaign, but I think there’s probably three forces that are really have an attack on the way we probably approach campaigning,” he told the audience at Sydney’s Sofitel Hotel.

These three forces are:

1. Customer expectations

Customers are expecting brands to be really exciting and engaging all the time. Which is tough for a brand like financial superannuation company BT, who, Nichelsen said is “more boring than banking”.

“The bar is raised by the best across the industry and we’re in the lowest of the engagement categories,” he said.

“Superannuation is not an exciting product and very little interaction with the product. So how do you build the engagement, or worse still, how you build enjoyment into a product that is inherently seen as tax, or as something that is a long way into the future.”

It’s a challenge for BT, but Nichelsen said they are tyring to build engagement to make sure that every time the brand talks with the customer, “there’s some value or some engagement they can get out of it”.

2. Data and analytic advancements

With technology, there’s no doubt there’s a lot of expectations on what we can do from a data and analytics perspective, said Nichelsen.

“One of the things most definitely that’s changed is this need to move from customer segmentation to customer recognition,” he said.  “We need to stop thinking about everybody as being groups of people and really start to think of people as individuals.”

It’s the whole personalisation deal.

“A lot of our systems don’t cater for that,” added Nichelsen. “They don’t cater for recognising our customer at every single point that they come in. Our customers have memories, but often our systems don’t have the same memories our customers do.” So customers will interact with BT over here, and then end up with a different chat over there. “They’re just not good experiences for our customers.”

It’s not a new revelation, but brands need to continue to be relevant to their customers. “It’s really now about understanding the customer’s journey and understanding the events and unique situations and really the context,” said Nichelsen.

Marketers also need to be smarter at how they use data and analytics. A lot has been documented on where tech and data are heading, but Nichelsen says the most interesting part about data is the human aspect of it.

“I think there’s a much bigger expectation, almost a permission, to be doing much more with data and thinking much more about analytics. There’s an expectation from our organisations that we are doing it.”

Marketers used to have to prove that these analytics or this bit of data is working, whereas now there’s a general consensus that it just works so people should just get on with it, added Nichelsen.

3. Marketing strategy and expectations

From a data perspective, Nichelsen said the real goal needs to be working on connecting and interaction.

Companies need to understand how to map out the customer journey and what it means with the data.