In the age of big data, why do so many brands find it harder to locate and define their target consumers? The old boundaries by which we define our consumers have all disappeared – category preference, demographics, city tiers – yet the emergence of “tags” and ecommerce data can’t fill the vacancy of understanding of consumers as real people. Thanks to the faster pace of digital and ecommerce campaigns, marketers now often have a more “grounded” intuitive understanding of the consumers, but at the same time, they struggle to quantify them. In this panel, UM discusses the art and science of consumer understanding and activation, from why it still matters both for ROI and for long term development of the brand and the business, to how to make it the focal point of the entire operations, to our endeavors to address some of the greatest challenges facing marketing communications today – how to combine “small data” with big data to create a fuller picture, how to integrate knowledge of consumers’ heart as well as behavior, and how to navigate the different “tagging systems” to find, and activate, the right consumers.

UM is a strategic media agency committed to proving that media is a topline growth driver as much as an efficiency play. We believe that better science and better art deliver better outcomes for our clients. We deliver science through the transformational power of business analytics and real-time data intelligence. We deliver art through creating moments that matter in media to deliver momentum for brands. As the leading global media network in IPG Mediabrands, UM operates in over 100 countries, with more than 5,000 people.