Kraft: Digital advertising has a serious data quality problem

By Digiday • May 18, 2015 •

Data is the new oil, the new gold, the new everything in digital advertising. It has become an article of faith that the future path of the industry is paved with ones and zeros. The problem is the current state of how data is used in digital advertising is a mess.

Kraft recently ran a campaign in which it used third-party data to target female consumers. Afterwards, it went back to find out the data overlay was 50 percent accurate. Another campaign was targeting trendy females, and it found that what made a woman “trendy” was she had visited a high-end furniture store site once in the previous six months.

Better off just throwing darts.

“You have to understand when they collected that information, what the consumer did to get put into that classification,” said Bob Rupczynski, vp of media, data and CRM at Kraft Foods, at the Digiday Programmatic Summit on Friday. “There’s just so many problems with the quality and the recency, the supply chain on that data that third-party data has a problem. We’ve got to get to the bottom of it.”

Check out Rupczynski’s thoughts on the industry’s data problems in the two-minute video below.