RIP: Fluff Marketing (send our regards to Don Draper)

We just got back from the Email Insider Summit in Park City Utah. I know what you’re thinking, ‘sweet place for a boondoggle’. You’re not wrong.

Jokes aside, there’s something about mountain air that provides a top notch setting for reflection and discussion of things outside the day-to-day hustle.

Erik (Founder of SimpleRelevance), Dan (Co-Founder of AdStack), Shawn (Founding Team of Groupon), Avi (Co-Founder of PhilterIt) and us Rapleafers, had many discussions around the future of marketing and start-ups.

As the week rolled on, one thing became glaringly apparent. Fluff Marketing is dead, and we know who shot Roger Rabbit – it was Big Data.

A 23 year old and his buddy who just graduated from Northwestern, starting their first company out of Ma & Pa’s garage, can now access the GNIP API, the Rapleaf API, process and store all of the data with Cloudera, bunker down for a few months with their Macbook Pros, and boom – the next 1-1 marketing software is received by the industry with open arms.

It’s not because its particularly easy, its because its insanely obvious that consumers are craving more personalized experiences. It just takes a few guys and gals with the guts to sit down and think through a pain point for marketers and consumers alike and, for instance, create software that leverages Big Data to automatically send a customer an email with the best product for him or her that exists within a brands inventory (this is what SimpleRelevance does).

If you are still sending the same message to all of your customers, we implore you to look at the metrics and reconsider. Data-Driven Marketing is not just the present and future, its good for your bottom line. RIP Fluff Marketing: 1872-2012.