Strap in, folks! Here we go again...

“Get ready for The Next Big Thing” because “everyone is doing it!” OK…product promotion or wishful thinking? Well, probably a bit of both but it seems that the line between objective commentary and self-promotion remains blurred, to put it kindly.

With LinkedIn seemingly morphed into Facebook 2.0, it provides a fun forum for hordes of self-appointed trend-setters aggressively peddling their wares with exotic predictions, declarations and often shamelessly false claims as to “what business wants” and “how the market is evolving”. But what stands out most from this deluge of posts – aside from the absolutism with which their claims are made – is that they are all usually made by parties offering those solutions being announced.

I have read that “Zoom” is here to stay, apparently. “Tele-marketing is dead” too, apparently…both claims made from the keyboards of those who prefer not to travel or pick up the phone, no doubt.

In the 90’s fax marketing became ‘a thing’ and its cheerleaders – those parties providing fax broadcasting services – predicted it would replace traditional mail. It didn’t.

Then email marketing became The Next Big Thing and its cheerleaders – again, those parties providing e-broadcast services – confidently predicted it would replace all other traditional forms of business communications. But it didn’t.

Then Social Media exploded onto the scene. Funnily enough, yet again their cheerleaders – those parties providing social media solutions – all predicted it would replace email and all other existing marketing channels…and again, it just didn’t.

While nobody can deny the ups and downs of market share throughout the evolution of direct marketing, the vocabulary employed by the various channel providers often verges on flat-out dishonest, doubtless fuelled by the market’s ravenous appetite for trends, fashions and the next passing bandwagon.

So where does a balanced multi-channel approach to a campaign stand with the cult of The Next Big Thing so aggressively dominating the conversation?

Well, here we are in 2023 and it appears that now the new ‘Next Big Thing’ is data mining. But like some dirty little secret, don’t expect to hear much of what really goes on behind the scenes any day soon – not when there are costs to be cut and profits to be made.

Hailed (again, mainly by those selling it) as “the future of sales generation” it is the application of web-based software to ‘harvest’ or ‘scrape’ data from a variety of prominent and obvious online sources. In the wake of GDPR with all its hype and passionate advocacy of data security and integrity, it could be argued that this dubious new pratice bends those rules well past breaking point.

Promoting it as ‘AI’ and throwing around lots of exciting buzzwords such as ‘marketing evolution’, ‘data feeds’, ‘accelerated growth’ and ‘sales engines’, a growing army of evangelical dream peddlers who are now flooding the B2B data market with this trendy alternative to more reliable methods of data generation. It is also being embraced by a surprising number of well-established and respectable B2B data providers who should know better.

We know from years of experience that Facilities and SHE professionals are nowhere near as active on the obvious online platforms as perhaps their colleagues in Sales, Marketing & PR (along with business owner-managers, consultants and media executives). That leaves a sizeable chunk of this target audience who cannot be reached by mining, scraping or harvesting.

This is why, despite all the hype, it is very much a limited one-dimensional prospect gathering tool and a free-for-all for you with all your competitors!

So is it cheaper? Not necessarily but as the old saying goes “you get what you pay for”. But is it viable? Not when those sources of the data finally get wise to the practice and block access to it. Is it accurate? Only if the source of the data itself has been maintained and kept updated. And is it legal? Only time will tell when the party is over and the complaints are rolling in.

Perhaps it has a limited role in helping the data industry through a difficult period but if it establishes itself as the dominant source of data long-term, we fear B2B direct marketing will have a dark and unsustainable future with ‘Quantity Over Quality’ as its epitaph.

So, in defence of the traditional data collection and maintenance methods, we believe data harvesting will eventually peak and then collapse when its weaknesses can no longer be excused or explained away, taking with it the dreams and hopes of many an ambitious marketeer sold on the thrill of “The Next Big Thing”!

Strap in, folks! Here we go again…