To Avoid Data Kidnap, Know Your Customer
15th January 2025 12:37
For the last 7 years, the Vuzo team has helped UK SMEs and Enterprise clients derive actionable insights from their data, tackling around 50 unique and knotty challenges in that time. Recently, we’ve noticed a growing issue we call “data kidnap”—when businesses offload tough data tasks onto big tech and end up paying a ransom in lost insights and mounting platform fees.
The conversation by the water cooler goes a bit like this:
“So hey, it turns out it’s not too easy to analyse my customer base and derive some personas and refresh them every month. So I’ll just bump that over to Klayvio, it’s off the shelf and fifteen hundred quid a month including the email sends, sorted.”
Or
“Oh, it’s hard matching my differentiated proposition and messaging to specific audiences in the online marketing space. I’ll just dump that problem onto AI-powered Pmax campaigns in Google Ads.” Dusts off hands and goes to the pub.
The trouble is, brushing these hard analysis questions under the digital carpet simply hands all the knowledge and insight about your business to Google, Meta and the rest. Next time you want to interrogate it, you’re effectively going to pay a ransom.
And once everybody has done the same thing, it’s no longer an advantage, it’s table stakes. And once the tech platforms have you, your data, and enough market share, they turn up the pricing heat.
UK B2C brands complain to us of ever-increasing marketing platform costs. Even at today’s levels, these costs are killing ROAS and eroding margin.
For example the Klayvio subscription tier to access your own data within their platform is now eye-wateringly expensive, and I will buy a triple macchiato with chocolate sprinkles for anyone who can show me their Google Ads PMax CPA or ROAS bids going anywhere other than skyward like the balloon from Pixar’s UP.
The longer you avoid analysing your own data, the more beholden to these platforms you’ll be, and the lower the chance you’ll escape their clutches as they jack up subscription prices and bid costs. Eventually, you’re basically working for them. Not quite the automated future you had in mind? Drop us a line.