No wonder it's become common to call data the "new oil". 

The analogy isn't perfect.

Data can be used many times, oil only once.

Data collection is everywhere today. Ever since the internet opened there have been companies keen to collect and exploit 'clickstream' gold that can inform those wanting to keep and eye on what we're doing and use it to sell us stuff.

Amazon, Alphabet, Alibaba, Facebook (Meta), Tencent - five of the world's 10 most valuable companies, all less than 25 years old - and all got rich, in their own ways, on data.

Data is the fuel for organised crime, especially when it comes to ad fraud - trivia fact the EU spend circa £300bn pa on advertising with the bulk of that on digital ads.

One of the bigger companies in the UK and long before 'Data Analytica' got caught with it's data pants down was in fact 'Dunhumby' - if you're a Tesco shopper its a data intelligence platform that's used to encourage you to shop and spend more with them.

Data is only as good as the insights and intelligence you can yield from it, and because we all live in a hyper digitally savvy connected world it seems there's plenty to go around.

Both the consumer (you/me) and all manner of businesses are totally dependent on data. We give it for free in exchange for access to social platforms, and businesses rely on data to send us all those intrusive adverts.

The difference with businesses is that their dependency is greater than ours - it's fair to say thay have a 'love/hate' relationship with ad tech but without so much of the reciprocated love.

The ad tech companies love it because regardless of how much of those ads are clicked on by bots the middleman always gets paid.

I once built (and sold) the 5th largest e-mail marketing company in the UK. 

I did this not by selling e-mails, not even by selling e-mail marketing albeit it most definitely helped to keep the e-mail machine 'oiled' to coin a phrase. 

We built it by selling what most companies really needed from e-mail campaigns which was actionable insights of user behaviour from these outbound messages. We created a way for them to 'listen' to consumers. 

Essentially we positioned the business as a 'data intelligence' service which allowed companies to overlay e-mail data and combine it with other internal multiple data sets to be able to track, trace, improve user behaviour, and increase spend - you could say it was "THE BIRTH OF 'EVENT DRIVEN ACTION MARKETING".

We were so confident of our secret sauce I used to "guarantee to generate 30% more revenues out of your existing customers or your money back"

We bundled the e-mail aspect as part of the 'cost per' model they were already paying for. 

Something I'm currently doing for the detection and prevention of ad fraud - the model of using the same budget to get a significantly improved service has alway been a winner. 

All common place today but back then most companies used e-mail to send the same message to everyone regardless where the consumer was in the journey with the brand.

So, people who had just engaged with the brand got the same message as those who had been with the brand for sometime.

The only email I know that has a 99.9% retention rate with the highest number of openings (4/5) are the confirmation emails as described above. We all keep checking how much we paid, did we order the right thing, when it’s getting delivered & have I really booked that holiday & flight correctly. 

Other than that, time limited and personalised offers do nothing other than force a click, which at best is less than 1%.

We built that e-mail marketing company off the back of one key principle which was to encourage brands to 'listen' by using the underlying data to what the suspects, prospects, and customers were telling them and then refine the conversation accordingly.

We're all just learning to understand the impact of giving away so much of ourselves in this brave new internet world and for sure, where theirs money to be made the fraudsters are never far behind.

So, instead of rewarding ad tech, how about adopting a social strategy that relies on good old fashioned storytelling by you and your employees?