‘Data in Motion’ Applies to Marketers Too

"However, in order to complete this transition, another fundamental wave is required. The operation of the business needs to happen in real-time and cut across infrastructure silos. Organizations can no longer have disconnected applications around the edges of their business with piles of data stored and siloed in separate databases. These sources of data need to integrate in real-time in order to be relevant, and applications need to be able to react continuously to everything happening in the business as it occurs. To accomplish this, businesses need data infrastructure that provides connectivity across the entire organization with real-time flow and processing of data, and the ability to build applications that react and respond to that data flow. As companies increasingly become software, they need a central nervous system that connects all of their disparate software systems, unifying their business and enabling them to react intelligently in real-time.
Because of this, we believe that it is no longer enough for an organization to innovate based on the current paradigm of capturing data, storing it, and then querying or analyzing it. Organizations need a strategy, and a foundational data platform, to operate their business in real-time based on data as it is being generated in the moment. This idea of “data in motion” is at least as critical to the operations of a company as “data at rest,” and we believe the new generation of winning organizations will be defined by their ability to take action on it. Traditional database technologies were not designed for data in motion, but architected for stored data at rest. Despite significant developments in the scalability and speed of analysis in both traditional and more modern databases (such as NoSQL, time-series, and graph databases), they remain limited to data-at-rest use cases and cannot harness data in motion. The leading open source offering for data in motion, Apache Kafka, was originally created by our founders at LinkedIn in 2011 and brought to the mainstream a new paradigm of data processing. However, this was only the beginning. Confluent was founded to create a product that could make data in motion the central nervous system of every company in the world.”
Creative Data in Motion
I’m sure they were not thinking of the creative industry when they wrote this, but the parallels are unmistakable. And this gets me to the second point that resonated – the idea that both technological and operational silos need to be broken down in order to meet the moment. That said, getting to “data in motion” in marketing and creative operations may be even more difficult than other areas of the enterprise, given a global landscape that saw creative capabilities and media/data capabilities split apart in the mid 90’s as part of the Great Unbundling, and that remains that way to this day.But this is changing.
Both in our work directly with marketers and in collaboration with our growing number of partner agencies, VidMob is providing the underlying software layer to help put data in motion in the creative world. With this in mind, it’s easy to take some of the key sentences from the above excerpt, and swap a couple of words to see how well the root concept aligns with VidMob’s view of the world:...Traditional agencies and marketing teams were not designed for Intelligent Creativity, but architected for stored creativity, uninformed and at rest.
...However, this is only the beginning. VidMob was founded to bring data and creativity together into a unified platform, serving as the operating system for Intelligent Creativity for every company in the world.
Confluent’s view that “organizations can no longer have disconnected applications around the edges of their business with piles of data stored and siloed in separate databases” seems to map almost perfectly to our view that marketing organizations can no longer have disconnected creative and media teams, siloed away from valuable data and fundamentally incapable of continuously developing data-informed content tailored to and optimized for every channel on which they communicate.