Search form Search About Leadership Our Divisions VOS VX News Insights Careers Contact VivaKi Insights Industry perspectives from VivaKi's brightest minds. Data! Data! Data! You Can’t Make Bricks Without Clay 1-20-2016 | by VivaKi Staff By Danny Hopwood, VP Solutions and Platform Operations, EMEA, VivaKi I love Sherlock Holmes and I’d just finished watching the abominable bride for the second time when I got to CES in Las Vegas. The place is a spectacle, unabashedly filled with lights and glamour pools and ignoring anything to do with the term low key. This was my first time at CES, and Vegas for that matter, and the place overwhelms you from the start. I wasn’t there to investigate consumer electronics but you can’t help but stand gob smacked at everything on show. 4k and even 8k screens with some of the sharpest visuals you will ever see. Tesla home batteries and chargers that make you rethink your electricity bills. A pair of headphones priced at $50k, the Chevy Bolt with 200 miles drive time on a single electric charge (which surely makes Tesla sweat considering Chevy still has a history in combustion behind it). Smartphones have largely left CES for their own events and what constitutes a CES announcement is something as simple as a new color choice for a smartphone these days it seems. Cameras at CES look like weapons and quite frankly just seem way too complex if it isn’t point and shoot. The iPad Pro seems to have sent every technology manufacturer on a reverse sprint up to CES as practically everyone has built a bigger version of the tablets they so painstakingly tried to shrink over the past few years. Anyone who says the iPad Pencil sticking out of the bottom of the iPad Pro as it charges looks cool really needs to evaluate if they know the difference between cool and idiotic anymore. The volume and sheer development that has happened over the past year for the connected home is impressive if a little scary. I’m not sure if I want everything connected. Fridge’s, ovens, washing machines, light bulbs, it all seems like the consumer is being led down a path to being a collector. You get one and you want to connect the rest because having a connected fridge and not a connected microwave means your collection isn’t complete. I don’t own a car but I now I feel like I need a car that at least connects to my phone. At CES you have cars that connect to your phone and turn the entire dashboard including the screen into your phone screen. I used to be happy with an Aux plug. That entire market looks too big and flashy to succeed with only Tesla and a handful of others taking your dashboard and turning it into a computer. Others continue to deliver the aux plug and a Bluetooth connection. Personal connectivity was also prevalent with NFC buttons for your suit cuff and belts that monitor your movement and waist line. There were numerous announcements of app developer programs for all the connected appliances and cars. You get the picture. The speed, drive and innovation present here is unfiltered. It’s a no holds bar brawl about what can we do next. How far can we push the limits of technology and can we make the intersection between consumer and appliance wider. A few blogs hit the internet about CES on the day and every day since with data being the common theme between them all. We must be generating so much and for every new appliance we amplify it further. The standard arguments of privacy rear their head but ultimately the consumer decides. Whilst the data conversation was secondary to the tech conversation on the CES exhibition floor, the inverse was occurring in meeting rooms where every big advertising holding company and the big digital players were having conversations that put data front and centre. Every single vendor – Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, twitter, all had data on the agenda and not the fabled “big data” but simply data. Data you can evaluate, data you can extract (in some cases) and data you can act on. Buying programmatically is here and it’s here to stay. Many talk about programmatic planning but without the tools and datasets to do it we are left handcuffed. Ad tech announcements at CES featured some of the big digital vendors giving you access to their data to manipulate it within their own environments to build the ideal audience and then simply push to your desired platform for ad execution. We have seen the walls come up around digital ecosystems but I think some are realising they may need to play a little nicer and “give a bit back” as we say in the North of England, if they want to maintain that happy customer that in 2016 won’t be a single platform conversation anymore. For every digital stack on show attempting to incrementally building their powerbase, there was a new entrant (or in some cases existing companies) who stepped into the neutral arena with the strap line of “we want to be the platform that plugs into all your buying platforms, we want to provide you with the common ID”. This seems to be the new trend and the new focus for some companies and it was a message heard loud and clear by every agency I am sure. I have said in the past that DMP’s were the next battle ground for ad technology and I still think that’s true. At the moment we seem to be in an ID sparring contest. Everyone has the most accurate method and everyone wants to be your partner. Companies tied into advertiser CRMs are pushing Into the ID arena while companies involved with advertisers’ digital buying want to move up a level and encroach into the ID arena and lodge themselves firmly In a CRM dataset. Data or at least the use of data will be big for 2016 and on the sales slides of every major technology provider within the programmatic arena. I’m talking about data that is a profile, that has attributes against it that is owned or powered by the big digital ecosystems we interact with every day. We have all done a great job in moving towards a programmatically traded market and yes we still have a way to go, but it’s here and its no longer the early days but it isn’t yet Minority Report-esque although some sales slides will tout that. There is still opportunity but it’s a lot slimmer than what it was 5 years ago and I fear many are holding on with finger tips to a massively fast moving beast that isn’t going to wait for anyone to catch up. The air of urgency from a few ad technology companies looking at where they go next is certainly becoming palpable. Having had a taste for CES, I will certainly be back there next year. It’s a heady world for any tech-enthusiast and I will be watching with interest how the worlds of advertising and consumer tech collide. Did I mention the drones? Go Back Article Tags CES VivaKi Danny Hopwood Share This Body facebook linkedin twitter email print OTA IAB Log in to the AOD Portal > Follow us Facebook LinkedIn Storify Twitter Instagram © Copyright 2008 - 2016 VivaKi. Privacy Policy Terms of Use