This article was originally published in WARC News & Opinion on November 13, 2020.

Too many companies are obsessed by technology and data, yet few have experienced significant improvements in return on investment (ROI) as a result of personalisation, writes Lars-Alexander Mayer.

Between the changes from Apple (IDFA) and Google (cookies), coupled with increasing government legislation following the GDPR and the CCPA, marketers are growing concerned about data usage and ownership.

To manage these concerns, marketers have been assembling their own technology stacks to manage their customer marketing data. However, as TD Reply learned in our recently published report ‘Rewriting the Marketing Playbook,’ while marketers are right to ‘own’ their customer data, their approach to data management must be business-first and not technology-first.

In trying to emulate the success of Google, Facebook and the big technology companies, too many marketers have put the cart before the horse by thinking technology-first. This has resulted in organisations collecting lots of data, much of it duplicated across different company siloes. But what is the value of all this data? What key performance indicator does each data point enable the marketing team to understand?

From TD Reply’s work with leading global brands, I can tell you that the data management process must begin with business metrics. Organisations need to only collect the data sets which enable them to understand customer needs, improve performance, and provide better service.

Data lakes can quickly become data swamps

Today, too many companies are obsessed by technology and data. They invest in technology infrastructure to capture data across the organisation, with any and every customer touchpoint inserted into a database. What started out as a data lake becomes a swamp full of data, much of it with little applicable marketing or business value.

Instead, businesses must start by asking themselves business questions. What do my customers want and how can my team deliver it in the best and easiest way? Then, businesses need to focus on defining, collecting, and analysing the data which will enable them to deliver the solutions their customers want.

For example, last year, Adidas published research showing that its attribution data was erroneously accrediting e-commerce as the main driver for sales. Only through a deeper dive using econometrics did Adidas discover that the company had undervalued the impact of video and other brand-centered marketing activities. By asking better questions, Adidas was able to more effectively manage its customer-centric business.

Personalisation has been a trend in data-driven marketing over the last few years, yet few marketers have experienced significant improvements in ROI due to personalisation. Customers are not looking for a marketer who knows their name and what they bought last month. They are looking for someone who can make them an offer that will delight them today and in the future, and this can be accomplished by being a customer-centric marketing organization.

Be agile with people and technology

As we learned this year with COVID-19, business needs can change dramatically and quickly. That is why marketing organisations need to be agile. It means working with adaptive feedback loops which can be changed based on customer responses and market dynamics. It is also important to recruit people who can adapt to changing environments and market conditions, and implement tools and technologies that support agile operations.

Let me be clear: data ownership for marketers is critical. However, marketers need to be ‘business-first’ and not ‘data- or technology-first’. Marketers need to determine which data they collect and analyse based on the business objectives that the data will empower.

Real potential of data is neglected

Thinking business-first is also about seeing though the marketing hypes of today and keeping the big picture in focus. Contrary to what big tech will suggest, and as the Adidas case attests, personalised ads and user-level data do not actually make marketing more effective and have little to do with customer-centricity. In reality, the data they generate is virtually worthless for answering the big questions that truly matter: what marketing activities are really driving my sales and my brand? How is my brand perceived? What markets should I target next?

Today, unfortunately, marketers use data mostly for tactical purposes such as for the optimisation of campaigns, neglecting its much more interesting strategic, predictive and explorative potentials. As a result, user-level data makes up a big part, if not the biggest part, of the data sold by different martech and adtech companies today. Real strategic value for businesses, however, is found in cross-section data such as ‘Share of Search’.

For example, a recent WARC article addressed how Share of Search is emerging as a proxy for Share of Market. We have enabled several global companies to prove Share of Search as a highly accurate Share of Market proxy in countries in Europe, North and South America and Asia (including China, using Baidu Data). We enable marketers to not only save time and resources, but also to be more precise in their marketing planning, as Share of Search can also be calculated on a regional or city-level.

It is likely that with the coming end of the cookie era, approaches based around using cross-section – rather than user-level – data will gain in importance. While many providers will likely not survive this change, for marketing as an industry this might be good news.

Forced to shift their focus from tactics to strategy, marketers may finally move from people-based marketing to outcome-based marketing and contextual targeting, as our report projects. In doing so, they might once again rediscover classic marketing theory and begin to ask themselves on a more regular basis whether what they are doing really adds to sales numbers and brand strength.

In the end, it all comes back to marketing successes and using data to generate insights that are relevant for business. To achieve this, a business needs to ask the right questions to drive for, and enable, measuring marketing success first.

The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: We use the SONAR trend radar, which tracks the volume of written scientific and journalistic publications on a certain trend, to find out what the top five trends are in these three categories. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to yield distinctive insights on global trends.

SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YoY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MoM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).

Each month, we present the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends by Momentum.

Top 5 Consumer Trends March 2021

The top five of consumer trends sorted by Momentum is dominated by trends related to the way we work, reflecting the impact of the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. Self-Employment displays the strongest Momentum by far, followed by New Work and Mindfulness & Conscious Living.

Top 5 Industry Trends March 2021

The strong Momentum of Start-Up Economy provides some hope for a dawning global economic rebound. E-Mobility is the only industry trend in the top five that grew both in terms of Growth and Momentum, which demonstrates that that it is a robust trend is here to stay.

Top 5 Society Trends March 2021

Global Power Shifts is the number one society trend in March 2021 and can be associated with the emergence of new powerful consumer markets, but also with new conflicts within and between nations. This trend should be observed closely in the following months.

Creating reports is typically one of the least favorite tasks for data-driven consultants and anyone working with an analytics dashboard on a daily basis The process tends to be time-consuming, tedious and prone to errors.

Users of the TD Reply Pulse dashboard, however, are better off: Pulse allows them to create ready-to-send PowerPoint reports in less than 5 minutes! Let us introduce: The Pulse PPT Export feature.

How It Works

Preparing a morning coffee is probably more complicated than creating a report with Pulse (especially for the miserable non-morning people among us). Basically, you select the data to be “reportified,” and voilá, here comes your neat, pre-formatted PPT.

One great thing about the way this feature works and which sets its apart from the competition is that the created PPT reports contain all the raw data from the dashboard modules. This means that users can easily extract the raw XLS data from the report in case of need, or modify it in a convenient way for visualization and presentation purposes.

Of course, it is also possible to schedule the report send-out, with a high degree of customization. You can choose exactly what data particular recipients will receive in their inbox and when, as well as set custom intervals. No uncertainties. 

There are countless of uses for this feature, including campaign reporting purposes. Amassing dozens of screenshots of dashboard visualizations to copy-paste into a PPT was yesterday. The PPT Export feature saves time and reduces annoyance. Data-driven analysts, consultants and research gain more time to do something more interesting.

Learn more about Pulse on its official website!

There are many Super Bowl LV campaign rankings out there, but none of them are truly objective. Neither popular user votings nor expert analyses rely on accurate measurements of a campaign’s creative or activating effect – not surprising, given that it is commonly assumed that creativity cannot be objectively measured.

But it’s time to finally prove that assumption wrong. For years, we have been developing and optimizing a tool that can actually measure creativity.

How the Data Creativity Score Works

To put it concisely, TD Reply’s Data Creativity Score (DCS) is a complex algorithm that allows for quantifying campaign effectiveness objectively, fast, and at little cost. Like most TD Reply solutions, the DCS is both based on marketing theory fundamentals and modern data analytics approaches.

The DCS produces a DCS score that reflects a campaign’s total effectiveness. This score is made up of two subscores, the Concept (C1) and Activation (C2) scores. To calculate C1, the DCS mines and analyzes user-generated content (UGC) which reflects the users’ reactions and perceptions of the campaigns examined. C2, on the other hand, is calculated by gauging the effect a campaign has on Share of Search on the brand or product advertized.

If you want to learn more about the Data Creativity Score, we recommend watching the video above and reading this article.

Time to move on to the most interesting part. What are the best Super Bowl LV campaigns according to the DCS?

We applied the DCS to 16 selected campaigns, made up of the winners of the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter (based on consumer polls) as well as a ranking created by the renowned German marketing magazine Horizont (based on expert opinion).

The Top 10 campaigns according to the Ad Meter were:

1. Rocket Mortgage, “Certain Is Better – Tracy Morgan, Dave Bautista & Liza Koshy,” 7.38
2. Rocket Mortgage, “Certain Is Better – Tracy Morgan & Joey Bosa,” 7.30
3. Amazon, “Alexa’s Body,” 6.75
4. M&M’S, “Come Together,” 6.73
5. Toyota, “Upstream,” 6.71
6. General Motors: “No Way Norway” (6.67)
7. Cheetos: “It Wasn’t Me” (6.52)
8. State Farm: “Drake from State Farm” (6.50)
9. Doritos: ” Flat Matthew” (6.40)
10. Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade: Last Year’s Lemons (6.36)

Now, let’s see how the DCS scored the best Super Bowl LV campaigns!

(Note: Scroll down within the iFrame to view the DCS scores. Hover over the tiles to view the Concept and Activation scores)

According to the objective criteria of the DCS, Doritos’ “Flat Matthew” is the best Super Bowl LV campaign, scoring very high on both Concept and Activation. Rocket Mortgages’ “Certain is Better” featuring Tracy Morgan, Dave Bautista, and Liza Koshy comes in second, with an ever higher Concept score. The bronze DCS medal goes to Toyota’s emotional Jessica’s Long Story.”

Kudos to Goodbye, Silverstein & Partners, Highdive, and Saatchi & Saatchi for creating objectively great spots!

The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: With our SONAR trend research platform, we are able to list the top trends within these three categories based on related mentions within publications. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to yield distinctive insights on global trends.

SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YOY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MOM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).

Each month, this trend monitor presents the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends sorted by volume and takes the last 12 months into account. The growth and momentum of the trends are also visible.

Top 5 Consumer Trends February 2021

Vegan and Vegetarian Food remains the top consumer trend in February. Healthy Lifestyle & Wellbeing gains volume.

Top 5 Industry Trends February 2021

Artificial Intelligence (AI ) remains the dominant industry trend and displays substantial growth. Data-Driven Enterprise enjoys both high growth and strong momentum.

Top 5 Society Trends February 2021

Global Threats remains the leading society trend, again gaining in volume and growth, though losing in momentum.

When the freshly graduated medical Doctor Ignaz Semmelweis started a position at the Vienna General Hospital in 1846, he was looking forward to kick-start his career at the most renowned institution of its kind. 8,000 patients were admitted to the hospital each year, and no other clinic enjoyed a higher reputation for the teaching of obstetrics. The hospital was a beacon of modern medicine and its maternal clinics aimed to revolutionize the treatment of becoming mothers and newly born infants.

Unsolved deaths and ignorant elites

Once he took up his position, Semmelweis found out that despite the hospital’s stellar reputation, reality on the ground looked starkly different. One in six mothers died within a week after giving birth, the highest death rate of any clinic in Europe. The hospital was, as Semmelweis put it, “truly an institution of death.”

It was decades before the germ theory of disease was discovered by Pasteur and John Lister, and the Hospital’s management assumed that poor air quality was the cause of the problem. This was addressed through improved ventilation and the burning of medicinal herbs, common procedures at the time. You will not be shocked to hear they did not yield any measurable results.

Semmelweis was as just as clueless, but, unlike his superiors, he didn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, he tried to systematically understand what was happening and in in doing so, set out to invent methods that would later revolutionize medicine. He took an ample interest in statistics and experimental design, which was at the time unusual for a medical doctor, and he spent much of his time collecting and analyzing data.

Using data to uncover the truth

Previously, Semmelweis had noticed that the first of the two maternal clinics had a terrible reputation outside of the hospital. Becoming mothers were begging on their knees not to be admitted, and when he started to compare mortality rates between the two clinics, he was able to confirm that the chance of dying in the first clinic was three times higher than in the second one. After isolating every possible cause – including differences in diet, the way the laundry was done or even religious practices – the only systematic difference he could make out was that the first clinic was used to train medical students, while the second one was mainly used to train midwives.

This observation again raised eyebrows with some of Semmelweis’ superiors. Did he imply that midwives did a better job of handling patients than academically trained future doctors?  The superiority of modern science was not to be questioned, and the implicit, uncodifiable skills midwives had been passing on over generations were little understood or appreciated among academic elites.

Semmelweis’s ultimate breakthrough however was triggered by a tragic event. His friend Jakob Kolletschka accidentally poked his finger with a scalpel while instructing medical students during an autopsy. He died shortly after, and his own autopsy revealed similarities with the women that had been dying of childbed fever. Semmelweis developed the hypothesis that the medical students performing postmortem examinations in the morning infected women in the maternal clinic in the afternoons.

Semmelweis himself had noticed an irritating smell on his hands after autopsies and got rid of it by cleaning them with chlorinated solution. As a consequence, he put up bowls with chlorinated lime (which was cheaper than pure chlorinated solution) in the maternal clinics and asked his colleagues to sanitize their hands before seeing patients. The impact of this was astonishing: two months later death rates fell from 18% to under 2% and close to zero in the following year.

The short-term risks and long-term rewards of speaking truth to power

As a result, you would think that Semmelweis was hailed by his peers and went on to spread the word about his discovery across the continent.

Well, you would be wrong.

Semmelweis was disciplined by his bosses, who believed that his discovery was way too simplistic. A single cause could not possibly be responsible for this much suffering and death, especially not one as banal and easy-to-fix.

Semmelweis was pushed out, the hand sanitizer tossed out and the hospital went back to smoking out evil spirits with incense and dried sage. In all likelihood, this drove up deaths again, but no one kept track anymore. Semmelweis returned to his home country Hungary to practice medicine and go on a crusade against the shortcomings of modern medicine. 10 years after leaving Vienna, he published the findings he had been collecting over the years, which were groundbreaking to say the least. Years later, Pasteur and Robert Koch (who had quarrels of their own) would uncover the foundations of microbiology, thereby explaining why Semmelweis’s findings were accurate and giving them further credence.

Unfortunately, Semmelweis would not live to witness the fame and respect he gained through his work. He became increasingly quirky over the years and picked fights with various renowned figures from the medical community. He ended up in a mental institution where he died of an antiseptic shock. Conspiracy theories are connected to his passing until this day, and the circumstances of his death do seem dodgy. Among other things, his final autopsy was conducted by his former superior from Vienna.

While Semmelweis’s story is tragic, his findings lived on to change medicine and save millions of lives. He became known as “The Savior of Mothers” and is still revered around the world. At least in part, his systematic analyses also laid the foundations of randomized control trials (RCT), which are today considered the gold standard of assessing the effects of medical treatments.

Three takeaways from the Semmelweis story

While I don’t want to equate his doing with our work in the modern business world, his story holds many truths that we can apply to leadership, analytics and personal philosophy:   

1. Intuition and data analysis must go hand in hand
Simple hunches can go a long way if you test them systematically. Semmelweis knew nothing about microorganisms, yet he was able to prove that hand sanitation could bring down the mortality rate at the hospital by more than 90%. Takeaway: Follow your intuition but make sure to collect data and systematically. It is the only way to know if you are headed in the right direction.

2. People might not like what you tell them, and that’s ok
Dreaming of rock-star level fame and popularity? At least in the short-term, don’t work with data. In fact, collecting data and drawing the right conclusions from it can make you more enemies than friends. This is especially true if a) you are challenging status quo and b) if you operate in a domain that was previously not data-driven. But don’t worry: history looks favorably on those who speak truth to power.

3. Don’t separate science from practice
Despite having data, never tell year-long practitioners what to do without trying to understand their craft. In the mid-19th century, much of the modern medical community looked down on midwives, a profession that had been built and whose practices had been passed on and refined over centuries, and who actually did a much better job of delivering newborns in the mid-19^th centuries than academically educated doctors. To make a comparison with the world of business: If you want to use a mathematical model to tell your sales or marketing teams what to do, better make sure in advance that you speak their language and acknowledge the intangibles that make up their craft. Otherwise, you will not only fall on deaf ears, but miss important insights that can enrich your understanding of reality.

The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: With our SONAR trend research platform, we are able to list the top trends within these three categories based on related mentions within publications. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to yield distinctive insights on global trends.

SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YOY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MOM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).

Each month, this trend monitor presents the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends sorted by volume and takes the last 12 months into account. The growth and momentum of the trends are also visible.

Top 5 Consumer Trends January 2021

Maker Culture joins the top five, overtaking New Work. All consumer trends show declining growth, which may be attributed to the effects of COVID-19.

Top 5 Industry Trends January 2021

Artificial Intelligence (AI ) remains the dominant industry trend, also enjoying strong momentum, while Data-Driven Enterprise comes in second.

Top 5 Society Trends January 2021

Reflecting the current global COVID-19 crisis, Global Threats remains the leading society trend, also displaying an extremely high YOY growth. No major changes compared to the previous month.

The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: With our SONAR trend research platform, we are able to list the top trends within these three categories based on related mentions within publications. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to yield distinctive insights on global trends.

SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YOY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MOM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).

Each month, this trend monitor presents the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends sorted by volume and takes the last 12 months into account. The growth and momentum of the trends are also visible.

Top 5 Consumer Trends

Veganism, vegetarianism, and a healthy lifestyle remain the top consumer trends in December 2020. New Work is a new entry to the top 5, also showing the strongest growth among all consumer trends.

Top 5 Industry Trends

Artificial Intelligence (AI ) remains the dominant industry trend, displaying an even higher volume and stronger momentum than in November 2020.

Top 5 Society Trends

Reflecting the current global COVID-19 crisis, Global Threats remains the leading society trend, also displaying an extremely high YOY growth. In contrast to the previous month, this trend is now also gaining momentum.

The monthly trend monitor provides a unique data-driven overview over the most important global consumer, industry, and society trends. How it works: With our SONAR trend research platform, we are able to list the top trends within these three categories based on related mentions within publications. Utilizing intelligent algorithms, SONAR analyzes a continuously growing database of more than 40 million publications from academic journals, expert blogs, mass media, and patent registers to yield distinctive insights on global trends.

SONAR can sort trends by Volume (number of articles relevant to a trend and relative to the SONAR index), Growth (YOY growth, volume of the last 12 months vs. previous 12 months) or Momentum (MOM growth, volume of the last month vs. volume of the previous month).

Each month, this trend monitor presents the top 5 consumer, industry, and society trends sorted by volume and takes the last 12 months into account. The growth and momentum of the trends are also visible.

Top 5 Consumer Trends

Veganism, vegetarianism, and a healthy lifestyle are the top consumer trends of the month. Self-employment, however, is the only trend in the top 5 which shows a positive momentum.

Top 5 Industry Tends

Artificial Intelligence is the leading industry trend and shows a high YOY growth. Start-Up Economy and E-Commerce show strong momentum.

Top 5 Society Trends

Reflecting the current global COVID-19 crisis, Global Threats is the leading society trend, also displaying an extremely high YOY growth. Its momentum, however, is declining.

This Checklist Will Help You Identify How

Now more than ever – with corporations facing unprecedented pressures to cut costs and increase efficiency due to the COVID-19 crisis – is the right time to start (re-)structuring and (re-)prioritizing the analytics and data solution landscape. To quote Fortune CEO Alan Murray: “The emergence from crisis shouldn’t be thought of as a ‘great restart,’ but rather a ‘great reset.’”

The staggering success of the world’s leading tech giants like Amazon, Tencent and Google gave multinationals across industries reasons to believe that data-centricity is necessary for growth and long-term survival. Consequently, the ‘data is the new gold’ mantra has proliferated within sales and marketing organizations in recent years. This doctrine has seen management consultancies, digital data providers, and market research companies building up a growing movement of data excellence.

Consequently, a multitude of data-centered initiatives are cropping up in the solutions marketplace, some more promising than others. From personal vanity projects with limited business impact, over advanced (though isolated) lighthouse projects heralded by progressive forward-thinking pioneers, to data infrastructure projects likely to be outdated before they are even completed- data is often still sourced by outdated market research kingdoms managed by the great masters of their guild.

On the other side, eager management initiatives striving for homogenization of tracking and visualization solutions as a countermeasure for decentralized centers of excellence and mavericks on market level are also making headway. And finally, ambitious projects trying to copy or even leapfrog digital tech giants, are coming into the picture, but often losing purpose and overestimating their capabilities.

Bootstrapping is long overdue – Cost-cutting can drive innovation

Such projects and their less-than-ideal impact on performance may sound familiar to many readers. Originally driven by good intentions, implementation is often complicated by internal managerial politics, reluctance to innovate, and adherence to previously committed paths.

The COVID-19 crisis not only incited massive cost cutting across most organizations globally, but also demonstrated why management levels need to have a more granular perspective on consumers, markets, and ROIs to steer their ship through the storm. Therefore, organizations must carefully assess existing measures, downsize antiquated and low-value measurement, and identify and fill white spots with lean and innovative data management approaches.

Use the current market contraction to clean-up, restructure, and innovate your data strategy

Of course, there is no universal recipe for success. However, the following guiding questions should open a dialogue of critical reflection of your insights-driven data strategy. Feel free to use the following self-assessment checklist as provocations for your company’s data goals:

THE WHAT – Does your company have clear insight into its business dynamics?

☐ We know exactly what drives our sales.

☐ We have an outside-in focus on customer satisfaction.

☐ We can identify weak spots in the sales funnel.

☐ We are able to use indicative predictions for sales and assess our headroom.

☐ We are able to focus on relevant segments and business upsides, not on pleasing every single customer.

☐ Our data vision can be realistically achieved and fits our long-term market and business needs.

THE HOW – Does your company use the right data analysis methods?

☐ We track our competition on market, brand, segment, product, service and sales channel levels in order to clearly identify our strength and weaknesses.

☐ We have an ongoing focus on our brand positioning and focus on customer-centricity.

☐ Our KPI logic is based on forward-looking indicators, instead of lagging ones.

☐ We leverage digital consumer perception data for continuous time series tracking of our marketing activities.

☐ Our initiatives result in insights that enable learnings and actions and are driving business transformation.

THE WHO – Does your company have agile program and personnel structures?

☐ We have a clearly structured and mandated governance body steering goals, approaches as well as technology and data stacks.

☐ We have a targeted insights distribution – “right insights for the right people”. Remember not everybody needs to be a data analyst.

☐ We build fit-for-purpose teams combining complementary commercial, analytical, and technical skills and perspectives.

☐ We consolidate our agency and service provider landscape to minimize alignment efforts and transaction costs and opt for lean solutions.

☐ We allocate sufficient funds for performance management in relation to what it steers.

☐ Our data insights strategy is optimized from a cost-benefit logic.

☐ We let internal customers pay for insights services to assure a long-term buy-in and determine relevance.

☐ We engage our employees to drive impact through insights and constant learning.

☐ We conduct regular (re)assessments of initiatives and solutions for future implementation success.

☐ We connect and align isolated products step-by-step, staying away from relying on any single technical platform, as it might lead to lock-ins and unnecessary streamlining costs.

Do not miss the opportunity for change

If most of the boxes were left unchecked, action is required. The tailwind of the crisis is the right time to kick-off a business audit and to seize the bootstrapping opportunity – conduct an insights solutions audit, take stock of what metrics are most important, reevaluate your team strengths. Regardless of how you plan to (re)strategize: Make sure to start with the business questions – every data strategy is just the means to achieve those objectives.