Are Snake Oil Vendors Responsible For Digital Marketers' Data Disconnect?

If you have seen the consultancy report in to data in Marketing Week today, you'll see it's a pretty damning indictment of digital marketers and data. As ever, with any report, you can go blind from statistics being thrown at you as you take in its findings. The stand-out results  are that only 7% of marketers think they are well set up to get insights from data, while more than half described their capabilities as "non-existent" or at the "beginner" stage. The outcome is that brands are having a difficult time understanding the customer journey, particularly when it comes to cross-channel, even more so when cross-channel involves offline and online, as it nearly always does. The researchers report back that this disconnect is forcing marketers to swap voucher codes for data, effectively offering discounts for someone's identity so the disparate elements of their customer journey can be stitched together. This has led to quite a stir because it has been followed up on by tech vendors pointing out that, of course, all marketers need are the right tools. And when they say the "right" tools, you can be confident in saying what they mean is that you need "their" tools.