Dunnhumby/Sociomantic

Of all the topics I might have chosen to kick-off my blogging foray, I though it would be appropriate to shed some light at this stage on the reason why I became interested in digital marketing in the first place. 

Having worked in finance since I graduated from university in 2007, I had had very little exposure to the marketing world. However, every so often I'd be lucky enough get an insight into the extraordinary things that were happening in the space through a very close friend of mine who was, at the time, working at a firm called Dunnhumby. 

For those of you who have never heard of Dunnhumby before (and I must confess that I new nothing of the firm initially), they are a UK-based 'customer science' company that helps retailers and brands analyze data in order to improve customer experiences and build loyalty. Founded by husband and wife team Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby in 1989, it came to prominence in the mid-1990’s for helping Tesco (who they are wholly-owned by today) establish the Tesco Clubcard, the marketing innovation that famously led the Tesco’s then-Chairman Lord MacLaurin to remark: “What scares me about this that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years".

Today, Dunnhumby has more than 2,000 employees in 30 countries, selling information from a 40-terabyte database to companies like Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola and US retailer Kroger.

Whilst there's a million more things I could say about Dunnhumby and its activities, what I think makes the company particularly interesting to us as marketing connoisseurs (or perhaps that's a little over-optimistic at this stage!), is what they're currently doing in the realm of big data.

Through its recent acquisition of Sociomantic Labs, Dunnhumby is leading the pack in the fight to integrate off (point of sale) and online data to create multi-channel customer insights. This could be particularly useful for CPG brands such as P&G and Kraft looking to retarget their advertising against real-life customer behavior and understand its impact on sales.

The Dunnhumby/Sociomantic nexus could set the standard for the way marketers approach the digital paradigm and it only seems like a matter of time before other data-heavy operators make similar strategic shifts in the programmatic media space. 

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http://www.dunnhumby.com/us

http://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2014/04/03/the-rise-of-the-data-driven-bidder-continues-sociomantic-acquired-by-dunnhumby-for-a-rumoured-200-million/