Let’s face it – media data can be particularly challenging. Whether it is plan, competitive, sales, social media, or the various flavors of digital (display, search, site analytics, and rich media), the compass seems to swing in every direction when determining where to start the analysis.

Today’s marketer is being forced to adapt their analysis to deal with the overload. Savvy marketers are starting to turn to “Analytics Platforms”—what others call dashboards. Innovation in this space is beginning to gain critical traction, and it is important to understand what success looks like before pursuing this as a solution.

The first area that needs to be clearly defined is the analytic goal. There are many possible goals: a marketer may want to improve on-the-fly decision making, redistribute marketing dollars from an underperforming media type, demonstrate what competitors are spending, or determine what online buzz is telling us about our brand against its competitors. A clear goal will empower a team to innovate, choosing tools and making progress through an iterative approach.

Although data-processing technologies have improved exponentially in the past five years, there is no textbook approach for fostering innovation in this space. Hoping that someone in your organization will come up with a significant breakthrough is a formula for disappointment. The Rolling Stones’s Keith Richards woke up in the middle of the night and played the riff to “Satisfaction” on a cheap guitar and recorder, but this is not the “lightning in a bottle” strategy that produces consistent results.

The teams that analyze data need to choose approaches, make mistakes, and improve. By fostering a skeptical, innovative culture on a daily basis, a team is better positioned to make changes in a systematic way. Provide your team members with the flexibility to make mistakes and give them guidance so they can fine-tune their approaches. Slowly pushing forward and experimenting helps prevent over-investment in flawed applications.

Here’s the plan – stop analyzing your problem, recruit a motivated team to attack the problem set, give them the latitude to recommend approaches, fine tune the solution, and continue innovating in an incremental fashion. Have fun, because the surf is up and the forecast is for more and bigger waves in the world of data.

At UM, the role of technology is enablement.  Enablement simply means we are using emerging technologies to modify current human capabilities; think of what the PC, the Internet, iTunes, and Facebook have enabled society to create. We also see enablement as maximizing each person’s latent potential, which helps our clients maximize the impact of their marketing investment to deliver explosive business results. How does this approach come together from a practical perspective?  Does a technology silver bullet exist?  No.  I only wish it were that easy.

The capability to develop a technology enablement strategy is a discipline that has become increasingly important at media agencies.  We believe that technology can provide a growing number of benefits: lower agency costs, provide on-demand information that includes investment and performance metrics, faster speed to market, better value for clients and improved return on investment.  Innovation in this area does not imply that the team that adopts the greatest number of “cutting edge” gadgets and applications wins the race.  Rather, the strategy of selecting the appropriate new tools and blending these with current applications and business processes to drive business value is the key to success.

A certain type of culture needs to be present for successful innovation in the technology enablement arena.  There is saying in the digital music business:“You know how to recognize the pioneers–they are the ones with the arrows sticking out of their backs.”  Driving innovation requires a team to be comfortable that they will occasionally stub their toes and use the learnings from the experience as a catalyst to improve future developments.  This collaborative culture is an important element to consider when choosing your media agency partners.  Understand that there are varying degrees of success when collaboration is not a key part of the fabric that weaves together interactions between the agency and client.

It is an exciting time to lead technology strategy in the media and entertainment, just make sure that you are wearing your seat belt as the industry hits a bit of turbulence as new technologies enter the marketplace.