Last week, we had the pleasure of interviewing Stewart Rogers, Director of Marketing Technology at VB Insight, VentureBeat’s research arm. Stewart has spent over 25 years in sales, marketing, and running software companies. When he’s not reporting the news on VentureBeat, he’s analyzing marketing technology for VB Insight, and speaking at events across the globe.

Stewart spoke with us to share his perspectives on real-time marketing and personalization, and where he sees the industry going in the future.

Earshot: “Real-time marketing” is defined differently depending who you ask.  How do you define it?

Rogers: Real-time marketing means responding to people in an instant, or at least understanding what is happening at that moment.

We see a lot of technologies that gather results – like social listening solutions, social media monitoring solutions – over a period. What you’re doing is effectively looking in the rear-view mirror at the data and then reacting to that data. But of course it’s old, it’s something that happened as opposed to something that is going on right now. Whereas real-time, per the name, is not just monitoring what’s going on, but instantly reacting to it in some way shape or form.

Earshot: How do you think real-time data can inform marketing personalization?

Rogers: We live in the age of the “never-satisfied, always-mobile customer.” When I say “never -satisfied,” I mean whatever product or service you sell they wanted a better version of that, yesterday. And when I say “always-mobile,” we’re talking about a world where people reach for their smartphones within 25 seconds of waking up to check their social networks and unlock them on average 214 times per day.

So when we’re thinking about mobile and web engagement, we’re relying primarily on real-time behavioral data – that is, as a visitor or user interacts with the website or with the mobile device. Their profile is updated and acted upon immediately in real time, and that’s crucial in today’s mobile customer base.

Earshot: You recently published a study on “hyper-personalization” with VB Insight, which investigates questions regarding marketing personalization and data privacy. How concerned are consumers today with real-time personalization?

Rogers: The fascinating thing about personalization is understanding how far we will go and where that we do becomes creepy to the consumer. I didn’t see a lot of people researching whether customers were ready for hyper-personalization, what their attitudes were towards it were, whether they liked it or not, and what sort of things you can personalize or what you cannot.

You’ve essentially got two camps in the personalization stakes. You’ve got the “Apple camp,” where Apple is very much on the side of “don’t give up any of your information, it’s absolutely sacrosanct.” Then in the “Google camp,” it’s more “give us your bits and pieces of data, and we promise to use them responsibly, and we’ll give you awesome experiences because of them.”

When it comes to people and their attitudes toward that, it turns out that while people are concerned about their data privacy, 77% of “digital natives” – the people that have grown up just using digital devices – expect a personalized website experience now. They know they have to give up their privacy for you to achieve that for them.

And then you have older people who are concerned but don’t act on that concern. And they’re completely happy if you provide them with something of value, fully knowing that you’ve used their data to give them that.

Earshot: Given recent developments in artificial intelligence and chat bots, can we expect to see more proactive real-time engagement from marketers?

Rogers: Predictive analytics, machine learning, deep thinking, and AI are all on everyone’s minds right now. We’re standing at the start of the chat bot revolution. However, there are certain real-time data points that customers are completely happy for you to interact with right now and there are others that they’re just not ready for you to use in an advertising context.

Earshot: In what ways are customers ready for brands to engage them using real-time intelligence?

Rogers: If you’re engaging with somebody predictively around something they’re likely to buy because they’ve shown enough intent, it turns out they don’t mind that at all. In fact, you’re being helpful because they’re thinking about buying something, and maybe asking questions of their friends on social media, and they just need to know what to do next. If you have a good suggestion in front of them at the right time, why wouldn’t they have a look?

Now let’s take that into the wearables market. It’s entirely possible right now from a technology standpoint for me to grab your publicly available Fitbit data. When you enter a store to buy shoes, I could identify you with a beacon, look up your Fitbit data and find out that you do an average of 2,000 steps a day, and suggest or promote a pair of fashionable shoes. Whereas if you average 20,000 steps a day, I might suggest to you a brand new pair of trainers/sneakers.

It turns out that customers find using fitness data – for anything other than a fitness app and the context within that app – completely creepy and over the line at this moment. You could end up with a backlash or some serious negative intent on social media if you did that right now, regardless of whether it is possible or not. Marketers have a tremendous responsibility to use that kind of data in the right way.

Another big thank you to Stewart (@TheRealSJR) for answering our questions.

What was your favorite part of the interview? Let us know in the comments below!