Data Is Content's Ally, Not Enemy

By: Sorab Ghaswalla

It’s not going away. Ever. Riding on the back of that monkey called technology, it seems like content and its marketing have been joined by debutant, data, raising concerns in a section of the global content developers’ community. This lot is worried that the forward march of technology will eventually stifle creativity.

​That possibility seems remote. Creativity is the outcome of an intangible process that can never be replicated by artificial intelligence, thanks to the complexity of the human brain. Original thought is the USP of the human mind, and that’s that.
Every technology comes with pros and cons. The way ahead then is to capitalize on the positives and work within the firewalls set by the negatives. The same, the same for data.

In the content ecosystem, data analytics is refining the user-development relation by assisting on two fronts. Cold statistics is helping creators better understand their audiences, and is also unearthing new “traffic”. Once content is created, data analytics helps to spread the word in a scientific manner.

Here’s an example. In the middle of the night, writer John Doe is hit with an idea for his next novella. He jumps out of bed, and by late afternoon next, bangs out the first draft of his murder mystery. Eventually, his publisher is happy with the final draft. In an earlier world, on publication, it would have been a “spray and pray” kind of marketing, with some basic form of audience targeting. But data analytics is taking the guesswork out of content and marketing. John Doe’s marketer can now target potential customers based on their profiles, reading habits, demography, segmentation and so on. Eventually, it will mean reaching the right profile of readers, thus increasing the chances of them buying the novella instead of putting the book in front of a random group of fiction readers.

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