Better Data, Better Engagement: 5 key themes shaping strategy in 2025

The Digital, Marketing & eComm in Focus 2025 study shines a light on the forces reshaping marketing, digital, and customer experience across Australia.  

This year, in partnership with Braze and Amperity, we hosted a lunch to bring one idea to the table: better data, better engagement. 

In an environment where brands are being asked to do more with less, the ability to unify, activate, and meaningfully engage through data has never been more important.  

And yet, capability gaps are widening, privacy expectations are shifting, and trust is on the line. 

So, in the spirit of delivering better data to drive better engagement – what were some of the biggest themes and outtakes from our supper club session held in June?  

1. Identity resolution: the missing piece in data unification 

Unifying data to build a single customer view is not a new ambition. Brands have been chasing the rainbow for decades. But in 2025, it’s still a work in progress. 

The study shows that only 14% of Australian brands are advancing their maturity in unifying customer data. In retail, that figure is slightly higher at 16% - but still low. And yet, unification is now considered table stakes and hygiene. It’s the minimum requirement to deliver modern, personalised and valuable customer experiences that meet consumers' expectations in market.  

But here’s the catch: unification alone is not enough. Without identity resolution - the ability to accurately recognise and connect customer interactions across touchpoints is diluted and leads to less desirable outcomes for brands and customers alike.   

Despite this however, only 10% of brands rated identity resolution as a key marTech priority over the next 12 – 18 months which suggests many brands are yet to connect the importance of identity resolution and unifying the customer. That’s a critical gap. 

Unification without identity resolution is like police watching CCTV footage from every angle—but not realising it’s the same person in each shot and so it's not meaningful in relation to the crime. . The same is true in customer experience: without identity resolution, we’re working with fragmented views that lead to disconnected experiences as well as fragmented insights. 

When identity resolution is missing, we make decisions on partial data. And that often works against us - undermining our ability to deliver meaningful engagement. 

2. Data activation: the bedrock of omni-channel experience delivery 

Even when data is unified, many brands are struggling to activate it effectively. 

77% of leaders say their organisation’s capability to activate data is “emerging at best.” This is a significant problem when more than 80% of leaders rank CX and personalisation as top strategic priorities. 

Without the capability to activate data across channels and teams, personalisation is delivered in more basic formats, and omni-channel experience ambitions fall short in execution. 

The capability to activate data needs to be built into the DNA of marketing and digital teams - not just left for SMEs but that needs to sit alongside of other important capabilities of marTech and experience delivery. And to address this problem, brands need to re-think roles and structures and embed what we call the “modern experience professional.” 

These professionals:  

→ Understand what data is available and how to activate it  

→ Know the capabilities and limitations of experience platforms  

→ Can identify and prioritise data-driven opportunities  

→ Have a deep sense of what constitutes a great customer experience 

Right now, these skills often sit in separate roles, creating too many handoffs, fragmented ownership, and process silos. If brands want to accelerate true omni-channel personalisation, they need more horizontally skilled experience professionals who can connect the dots and drive outcomes. 

AI may assist with speed and scale, but critical thinking, data fluency, and experience design remain human responsibilities. Building these skills across teams is essential for the next evolution of CX. 

3. A continuous value chain: moving beyond linear thinking 

Many brands still think about their data and experience strategy as a linear, step-by-step process - first unifying data, then activating and then optimise. 

But the best-performing brands operate differently. They understand that customer experience delivery is a continuous loop where identification of opportunities, unification, enrichment, activation, and optimisation are happening simultaneously – as various initiatives are at different stages of the cycle at any given point in time and as data and platform capability evolves so too does the initiatives we bring to market.   

This approach unlocks value earlier, builds capability across all stages at once, and links unification efforts to tangible business outcomes faster. 

In a fast-moving market, waiting for perfect data is a luxury brands can no longer afford. 

There will always be more data to integrate, more data quality issues to resolve, and more ways to enrich data. But value comes from momentum - not perfection. 

The best advice? Start activating what you have, while continuously improving what’s in the pipeline. 

4. Privacy has changed - but most brands haven’t 

Privacy reforms are already here, but most brands are still under-prepared. 

The study shows 6 in 10 brands do not have a clear plan to evolve in line with privacy changes. Even more concerning, nearly half of marketing and digital teams — the very people most actively collecting and using customer data — don’t fully understand the changes enacted and coming. 

Others think they do. But in reality, their understanding is in the most basic of forms. 

This gap is critical, because the rules of the game have changed. Regulators now have the power to issue fines for non-compliance without lengthy court processes. Enforcement is coming. 

Meanwhile, consumers care deeply about privacy. Nine in ten Australians believe they should have the right to view and delete the data companies hold on them. And whilst many leaders within organisations still believe that consumers don’t care about their privacy, the reality is they feel disempowered to manage it, because navigating privacy settings day to day across many digital platforms is complex and inconsistent. 

The window for passive compliance is closing. Privacy must now be embedded in how we design customer experiences - not treated as a post-campaign or initiative checkbox. 

Brands must shift their mindset from: “How do we stay compliant?” to “How do we build flexibility and control into our experiences in a way that earns trust — and is commercially sustainable?” 

Brands can no longer separate data strategy from privacy strategy and that means to deliver better data to deliver better engagement, privacy must be a key part of the conversation not an after-thought.  

5. The rise of conversational engagement  

We can’t talk about better data and better engagement without considering the shift to conversational based interactions and the impact on data and experience strategy.  

The study shows that whilst year-on-year brands have moved from cautious interest in GenAI to active adoption - most are still focused on driving efficiency and basic workflow automation. 

But as we’re entering a new era of engagement: one that is conversational first and foremost, it will challenge brands to think very differently in how to leverage data and build more meaningful engagement and experiences. Consumers increasingly expect to interact with brands through voice, messaging and chat, and two-way dialogue across the path to purchase. 

This shift will: 

 → Deliver richer intent data through conversations  

→ Introduce new volumes of unstructured data  

→ Surface emotional signals that have long been missing from digital strategies 

Brands will need to evolve how they capture, process, and activate this data to deliver more natural, human experiences at scale and also re-consider their marTech stack to unlock conversational capabilities that support a new way to engage, inline with rapidly changing expectations and behaviours.  

The question is: are brands ready to meet this shift head on? 

Better data drives better engagement. But better engagement is only possible when built on a strong data foundation and when brands move to build capability, culture and cross-functional ways of working to deliver on the engagement and experience ambition.  

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Download the full report for deeper insights into how Australian brands are navigating the year ahead.