Published July 20
Economic uncertainty may be making some marketers more cautious, but it hasn’t brought consumer spending to a standstill. In fact, a recent Visa economic outlook found spending has remained resilient across much of Asia Pacific, with Australia and New Zealand even recording an uptick.
What does this mean for marketers under more pressure to prove the return on every investment? Visa Oceania’s head of audience and platform partnerships, Drew Perry, says data is taking on a broader role than audience targeting alone.
Speaking with The Current, Perry breaks down how the ANZ data landscape is evolving, why better signals matter more than bigger datasets and how marketers can make smarter decisions in an increasingly uncertain environment.
How has the ANZ data landscape changed in recent years — are marketers using data differently?
The biggest shift is that data has moved from being a targeting input to becoming a broader decision-making layer. Marketers are no longer just asking, “Who can I reach?” They are asking, “Where is demand moving, which audiences are likely to matter and how do I prove that media investment drove a commercial outcome?”
In ANZ, that shift has been accelerated by privacy expectations, signal fragmentation and greater pressure on marketing budgets. Marketers are increasingly looking for data that is not only useful, but also trusted, explainable and privacy-conscious.
How is economic uncertainty impacting the way marketers think about data?
Economic uncertainty is making marketers more selective and more accountable. When budgets are under pressure, every dollar needs to work harder.
That changes the role of data. It’s no longer enough to use data simply to reach more people — marketers want to understand which audiences are showing meaningful commercial intent, which markets or categories are moving and which campaigns are driving incremental outcomes.
This is where privacy-conscious insights and measurement become especially important. In a more uncertain environment, marketers need confidence before they invest and proof after they invest.
How important are economic and behavioral signals for marketers? As data sources multiply, how do marketers separate meaningful signals from noise?
Economic and behavioral signals are becoming more important because they help marketers get closer to real-world demand. But more data doesn’t automatically mean better decisions. In many cases, marketers are dealing with too many signals, inconsistent quality and a lot of proxy metrics that don’t always connect back to business outcomes.
The way to separate signal from noise is to focus on three things: relevance, reliability and measurability. Is the signal connected to actual behavior? Can it be used in a privacy-conscious and compliant way? And can it help inform or measure a business outcome?
The opportunity is not to use more data for the sake of it but to use better signals that help marketers make clearer decisions across planning, activation and measurement.
What’s the biggest misconception marketers have about consumers in ANZ right now?
One of the biggest misconceptions is that consumers are simply pulling back across the board. The reality is more nuanced. In Australia, spend momentum has remained resilient, but consumers are being more deliberate about where and how they spend.
Rather than a uniform decline in demand, we’re seeing demand shift across categories, channels, locations and moments. For example, experience-led categories such as travel and dining continue to show resilience in parts of the region, while more every day or price-sensitive categories are showing signs of value-seeking behavior and volatility.
For marketers, that means broad sentiment or high-level economic indicators only tell part of the story.
What do you think the next evolution of data-driven marketing in ANZ will look like?
The next evolution will be more outcomes-led, more privacy-conscious and more connected across the marketing workflow. Data-driven marketing will move beyond audience targeting alone and become a layer that supports planning, activation and measurement end to end.
I think the future is less about building bigger pools of data and more about using trusted signals in smarter ways. Marketers will want to understand where growth is coming from, activate against meaningful cohorts and then measure whether investment created incremental value.
The strongest solutions will be those that can help marketers make better decisions while protecting consumer trust — using aggregated insights, approved use cases, clear governance and measurement approaches that avoid over-claiming.