Sanoma will be moving beyond the serving ads advertising model.

Our mobile devices become the remote control for our daily lives. This will generate data (of a dimension which we have never had before), which in turn provides Sanoma the means to really increase our value for our B2C customers (providers of the data) and our B2B customers. It provides Sanoma the means to become more relevant at the right time and place, and transform the accepted practices of marketing, media and commercial communication.

Data has always been used in marketing, but it has been on a path of evolution. Three key stages can be identified:

• Stage 1: Socio-demographics: age, gender, postal code, occupation, lifestyle, mentality.
• Stage 2: Context sensitive: search domain/subject, time, location, mood
• Stage 3: Social Marketing Intelligence: the combination of market segmentation and context, combined with customer behavior and social network profiles.
  

Marketing-, media-, commercial communication-decisions and data need to be symbiotically connected to each other to optimalize value, and to optimalize (marketing) resources for all partners (B2C customer, B2B customer, Sanoma). It this way the resources of Sanoma and our partners can be deployed intelligently at the right place and at the right time to create optimal value for all partners/participants/actors, while applying the optimal business-model(s) for that specific 'constellation' at that specific moment.

The decision on how much to spend and where to allocate (marketing- and media-) resources will evolve:

• the once-siloed 'static'data warehouse becomes a living 'enabler' of making realtime (marketing- and media-) resource-allocation-decisions on a continiuous basis.

The effort and attention of marketing has always been focused on one aspect of marketing (serving ads). We have to get used to leave this one dimensional view behind us, when one begins to realise how a data-driven approach to marketing can be transformational by offering an opportunity to remove 'static' organisational silos that truly hinder that continious, fluid, dynamic process of resource-optimalization.

The way forward is to better understand what data Sanoma (and Sanoma's partners) do already have and will generate. We have to think about how that data gets better through user-interaction [through interaction with our B2C and B2C customers] and take care of 'co-produced offerings' (services/products/applications) for those partners that give them back the value of that data.

Which players in the media-industry are (culturally) able to make this fundamental change of mindset and transform succesfully? The timing of this necessary transition is crucial. So time will tell us.

David de Boer, Head of B2B Marketing, Sanoma Uitgevers, The Netherlands