Customer Data: The Intangible Asset You Didn’t Know You Had
Customer data is no longer just phone numbers, addresses, zip codes, and work phones. In the age of programmatic media buying, customer data is quantified and codified down to screen behavior, social behavior, geo-location, favorite foods, favorite vacation spots, and much more. The evolution of customer data is the major driver behind creating business value and yet one of the most elusive.
Jahani and Associates analyzed over 500 M&A transactions among technology giants. We determined that 100% of the marketing and advertising acquisitions were driven by customer data capabilities. Technology giants use customer data to improve media buying. The acquired customer data capabilities:
- Increased number of customer data interfaces for the acquirer
- For example: Alphabet’s acquisition of Famebit
- Increased processing power of the acquirer’s customer data
- For example: Alphabet’s acquisition of DeepMind. DeepMind provides deep learning solutions. Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, said that he wants to build a search engine so advanced that it could act like a “cybernetic friend.”
Companies seeking to maximize their value in the technology space must intimately understand their data and how it can be used to improve both collection and processing to generate insights. Jahani and Associates uses its proprietary Intangible Asset Framework to understand how our clients will increase their competitive advantage around customer data.
We have developed this framework from serving $100 million technology clients and partnering with large VC firms. Our findings consistently show how successful customer data strategies overlap with either a lucrative business model or the business model of a strategic partner. Our three-step process that identifies, develops, and monetizes intangible assets will measure your competitive advantages, such as customer data monetization. This provides consistent and repeatable results for maximizing value.
