FEATURE24 October 2013
The name of the game has changed
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‘Consumer insight’ has become ‘data investment management’ within Martin Sorrell’s WPP. He explains why in an interview with Brian Tarran.
‘Consumer insight’ is dead. Long live ‘data investment management’. At least, that’s the case within WPP, where a new name for the marketing services group’s insight division was ushered in during August.
The name-change was made with very little fanfare – mentioned in passing halfway through CEO Martin Sorrell’s first LinkedIn blog post. The post itself caused quite a stir, but mostly for the fact that Sorrell had finally joined a social network.
However, it was the name change that intrigued us. So we put it to Sorrell: What was the rationale for rebranding the consumer insight division as data investment management?
“It’s very deliberate, ” Sorrell said, in a telephone interview. “A lot of people talk about data, but they don’t know what they are talking about. A lot of people talk about big data, and they don’t know what they are talking about. But we have a real data business [within WPP] and I want to focus more ...
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4 Comments
Ray Poynter
11 years ago
Data Investment Management may make sense for how WPP is run and organised. However, I don't see the term as being useful for what most readers of Research-Live are involved in. I am keen that whatever term we use refers to people, for example customer insight, and I am keen that we focus on the ends not the means. Insights or 'better decisions', or 'better products/services' are ends, data management is important, but it is a means. Also, I am not sure we want to describe what we do as DIM, plenty of other people already do ;-)
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Anon
11 years ago
Agree that DIM may appear to limit the impact and the vernacular of insights. However, there is a major difference between data management and data investment management - put simply it is reach + value. Imagine this - an agency that becomes a DIM (ok - horrible TLA) for a client extends its reach into the client business. It will be evaluating the worth of data from a wide range of sources, then interpreting this for the client and developing insights that have greater value and impact than a single ad hoc project. The value for the agency? - it becomes very difficult to replicate this model with another agency, so you develop a very strong bond with the client, much like the WPP network of media agencies who typically have long-standing relationships that extend way beyond the simple principle of media buying. BTW - serious credit to research-live for getting the interview with MS, he may be unbearably smug, but we would be foolish to underestimate the importance of his views. Any chance of a keynote at one of the research events with a panel of clients and non-WPP agency heads? that I would pay to hear....
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Lucas Borja
11 years ago
It does seem like the word 'insight' is being sent to a lower plane, and 'consumer' is gone altogether. Perhaps an indication (realisation? admittance?) that consumer insight is not always achieved (which is a valid yet difficult result to present in research), but data investment by clients will continue to occur regardless. So the Consumer Insights division rightly steers towards the core of what needs to be done (data investment management) to potentially achieve consumer insight, and in case it doesn't then it will have positioned itself to have an overview of what needs to be done (data wise) in the next effort, which is in itself a valuable insight of a client's data assets i.e. consumer insight is not the only thing to be gained from data investment management. http://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasborja
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Anon
11 years ago
Sounds like more jargon from people who have no idea what they are talking about. Has he ever worked with data at a grass roots level? Has he been involved in the actual process? I doubt it. Silly interview really with pointless jargon.
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