Perhaps like no other, the food and drink sector relies on well-targeted advertising to drive sales. While ‘Horsegate’ has highlighted consumer concerns about standards, price is just as important.

Spreading the message that your product is value-for-money and trustworthy is no mean feat. And if recent events have exposed the complications of the global supply chain, it is at least matched by the complexity of the online ‘food chain’.

Food and drink advertisers need to understand the internet-savvy consumer. However, when it comes to how they interact with their media channels, and, by extension, their consumers, it’s complicated!

There is a preponderance of intermediaries in the digital space, each clamouring for attention offers of mass exposure come with the added bonus of unprecedented consumer targeting, thanks to reams of data. But this currency is being jealously guarded by these intermediaries. This is not right.

The morality of targeted advertising is currently being debated by the EU. ISBA’s stance that without advertising the internet would be far poorer looks to be taking hold. Yet there is still a growing friction about who should own this data and how much should be supplied. Does it belong to you, as advertisers, or with the digital media channels who distribute your promotions?

Advertisers have always had access to data, and this should also be the case in digital. It must, of course, be anonymous personal data is by law protected from non-consented sharing, and rightly so. But there is also the issue of how to translate this wealth of data into meaningful knowledge for advertisers.

Must advertisers have to petition media channels for an insight into the consumer contacts they have invested in?

While making sense of this unrefined data is demanding, advertisers that can handle these data torrents should be able to take it as a given that access comes as part of the package.

After all, raw data, without the means to access and interrogate it, is the next most useless thing to no data at all.

Bob Wootton is director of marketing and advertising at ISBA

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