NEW YORK ? A Microsoft executive at the ad:tech New York 2013 conference said that the explosion of mobile devices in the past few years means that as consumers are constantly plugged in, they are also increasingly frustrated by devices that are not contextually-relevant. 

During the ?Digital Trends: The Future is Now? session, the Microsoft executive spoke about mobile and digital trends that are impacting marketers based on some recent research from Microsoft. As more devices become available to consumers, the backlash is making consumers more plugged in and constantly connected than ever before.

?What we know is that we do in fact have this analytical side and this more emotional, intuitive aspect to us and we know in operating organizations that sometimes, we get a team that has the balance, but we clearly are in fact full-brained people,? said Rick Chavez, chief solutions officer of marketing and marketing solutions at Microsoft, Redmond, WA.

?So we what we also see is in some of the research and findings, some of the patterns and the trends seem to be about data initially and some seem to be about experience, the emotive and intuitive side,? he said. ?But what?s really intriguing is that there started to be these combinations that we thought were really interesting.?

?It seemed to feed into the challenge that we have as marketers, so as marketers I think ? and I?m going to exaggerate to make a point ? that as a CMO you are a brand steward, you had the motive and intuitive expression of the brand, that was your primary stewardship of a company. And with the explosion of data, now there?s this extraordinary amount of sort of Big Data phenomenon, bringing the analytical in and doing more with the analytical, so balancing this interplay between the left brain and the right brain is an increasingly challenging and important aspect of what we do.?

More mobile data
The key for marketers with this though is that consumers want their data to be valuable.

The proliferation of mobile and digital devices is causing marketers to trigger messages at the wrong time.

The flood of new data coming in at marketers is also giving marketers a better chance at creating tailored marketing, which is especially important on smaller-sized screens.

For example, a consumer who is the market to buy a car might not know which brand they are interested in, but based on data collected about a user, marketers can have a better guess at what type of car model a consumer is interested in.

Additionally, a consumer that is at work and in a meeting should not be pinged by all of their different devices if a meeting is scheduled.

At the same time that digital is making day-to-day life more disruptive, multiple screens are making it easier for consumers to find and discover new content. 

Another big opportunity for marketers is China, where 35 percent of the country?s population is accessing the Internet through mobile phones and tablets.

Better targeting
Although there are privacy concerns around data, there is a wealth of information for marketers from the data that consumers are willing to fork over.

?For the technologist adopter ? by this I mean someone who maybe is in marketing technology in a large organization ? who?s scratching their head about proliferating media and proliferating devices and this multichannel and omnichannel world that we?re in and is wondering, ?how do I get ahold of that?? Mr. Chavez, said. ??How do I manage that? Because it seems like it?s a world of proliferating complexity.?

?And in fact, my bad news about that is there will be more media, there will be more devices, there will be more channels, so I don?t think we should expect that complexity to go away,? he said.

?However, if you flip it on its head and say, ?who is this person? What is it that they value?? and take a deep personalization approach that says, ?what if I engage in permission experiences?? In other words, people own their data ? acknowledge that they do and allow them to opt-in to experiences that might be temporal, might be only for a limited time, might be sustained, might be a wedding, so nine months from now, think about those kinds of things and put the person at the center.?

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York