What is the BlueOcean Data Fabric?

What is it? #

The BlueOcean Data Fabric™ is the most comprehensive and marketer-ready dataset available, which fuels better decisions through access to the most relevant market signals for your brand and your competitors.  It empowers marketing and business leaders who are making strategic decisions that build long-term, durable growth for their organizations – strengthening marketing and brand strategy with competitive intelligence, optimizing channel approaches, and improving the impact of messaging & content. 

As economic challenges mount, CMOs are taking on an increasingly critical role in the C-suite to drive long-term, durable growth for their organizations.  However, amid widespread budget cuts and layoffs, teams are effectively being asked to do more with less, while facing some mounting challenges.

Our lives have become increasingly more online, and as a result, we’ve seen an explosion in digital behaviors and an explosion of touch points that a brand can have with a customer. And trying to understand the impact of marketing and brand is still incredibly difficult.  Despite 11K+ martech solutions available, marketers are left to cobble together channel metrics or rely on survey-based brand trackers that provide generic, infrequent snapshots subject to bias and methodology issues.

Artificial intelligence presents a unique opportunity to disrupt this story, empowering us with the ability to process and identify patterns from massive amounts of data. But in order for AI to generate useful insights for marketers, it needs to be powered by relevant data.  Data is becoming a competitive necessity for marketers in an AI-empowered world.  Marketing leaders must future-ready their organizations, by modernizing their approach data.  This is why we built the BlueOcean Data Fabric™.

How it Works #

Managing mass amounts of data is complex and requires several important steps, to ensure that the insights marketers derive from the data lead to more confident business decisions. The BlueOcean Data Fabric™ comprises two critical data services:

• Ingestion
• Transformation

Ingestion #

We collect the most relevant market signals for your brand and your competitors, ingesting over 1,200 authoritative data points from third party and publicly available sources. 

• The data sources represent directional signals made up of audience signals (like social engagement), strategic signals (like media investment levels) and business signals (like market share). This data helps you understand your brand and marketing strategy holistically by eliminating blind spots left when you rely on single point solution providers or survey-based data alone. We pull in data from specific channels (like media spend and organic social), not to myopically optimize channel performance, but rather to help you optimize your entire strategy.   
• We amass valuable data across 3rd party partners which charge fees. If you were to try and replicate, it would cost between $790,000 to $1.2 million per year in access fees. 
• We do not ingest first party data from you, we rely instead on third party and publicly available sources, in order to ensure you have an unbiased, apples-to-apples competitive comparison. Because we don’t use first party data, there are no integrations required, and no burdens for IT. 
• In order to build the most comprehensive dataset for marketers, we use automations and machine learning to collect and process data on a petabyte-scale (a petabyte is the equivalent of 500 billion pages of standard printed text).  With this massive dataset, we can ensure you have the most sufficient and contextual data. 

Transformation #

We use AI to transform disparate data sources into a set of data insights that can be leveraged by marketers to truly understand the health of their brand across the funnel. The transformation process has several key parts:    

1. Preprocessing: We clean and preprocess the collected data by removing irrelevant information, handling missing values, and standardizing data structure to format for further analysis. 
2. Brand Configuration: Your brand is a complex combination of all the touch points you have with your customers, which is why configuring brands within the data is a critical task.  We leverage a custom configuration which taps large language models to identify relevant data from you and your competitors across the various sources.
3. Extract and Analyze Critical Characteristics: We extract the most relevant features from pre-processed marketing data (such as content type, content channel, key messages and performance metrics), which can be used to identify patterns and similarities among activities (For example, mapping keywords from content into topical themes).
4. Apply Marketer-Tailored Evaluation Framework: Once the data has been processed, configured and extracted critical characteristics, we transform it into meaningful insights about brand health by layering on marketer-developed logic, purpose built by brand marketers and data scientists for understanding the health of your brand across the funnel. We created an index score so you can always see your brand within the context of your competitors.  Much like the ocean, your brand exists within an ecosystem, which is always impacted by world events, competitor movements, and audience shifts. To make truly confident decisions, we cannot measure your brand in a vacuum without accounting for that ecosystem impact. We weigh the relative importance of specific brand and marketing actions.  Using our data, we determined the 5 factors of brand health most closely tied to durable growth, and we use that insight within our weighting structure to help you view your data through the most actionable lens.

You can access the BlueOcean Data Fabric through our application Brand Navigator, as well as through our brand strategy services which provide customized reports tailored to your business.