Sensing a need to help clients get over their data anxiety, Toronto-based interactive media and digital marketing agency Delvinia has launched a new custom solutions group, Delvinia Custom Solutions (DCS), in a shift toward helping clients understand and utilize the information they collect.
DCS offers to make better use of the data gathered by its other business units, helping clients with data visualizations, insights and customer engagement. (The company continues to offer its data collection services, AskingCanadians and AskingAmericans, and its customer insights platform, Methodify.)
“A lot of what we’ve been doing is more around the collecting part of it,” said Steve Mast, Delvinia’s president and chief innovation officer. “What we’re moving towards is providing more of the other side of it, which is ‘how do I enable that information?’
“It’s really aligning everything we do around collecting, visualizing and enabling data,” he said. “The organization now is becoming incredibly focused around that specific offering, because we do see it as a huge need in the market, and there’s a growing gap.”
Mast said marketers have been gathering data for years, but the majority aren’t utilizing what they’re collecting, missing significant opportunities as a result.
According to a recent survey by the Direct Marketing Association, only about one-third of marketers felt they had a good grasp on their data, while just 3% felt their data was well aligned.
“Data has been talked about ad nauseum for several years now, and it’s amazing, when we go into various organizations, how far they still are even with things like basic analytics,” said Mast.
Delvinia has also been focused on how emerging technologies like augmented and virtual reality will impact data collection and utilization.
“Since the beginning of the internet, it has done two things really well: it has collected information and displayed information. That’s all it really does,” said Mast. “What we’re trying to do is help organizations collect better information and display better information.”
