The premise is simple—keep the customer happy. However, for a marketer, there is a lot more riding on that obvious statement than one might imagine, as Joanna O’Connell, Chief Marketing Officer, MediaMath, explains.
Whether you’re an agency looking to constantly create compelling content which won’t force people to switch off, move away, ignore or, even worse, block your clients’ ads, or a publisher looking to maximise the value of your inventory, the role of programmatic—automation of process and decisioning through technology –doesn’t change.
It is to deliver the right content to the right people in a fast and seamless fashion.
Today, consumers are voting with a click of their computer mouse to avoid disruptive, annoying or irrelevant advertising, and advertisers and publishers need to answer their call for a better, more relevant experience. According to industry predictions, $41 billion dollars’ worth of ads will be blocked in 2016[1].
That suggests, loud and clear, that people are not overwhelmingly happy with the way that ads are delivered, or the content that they are being presented with in those ads.
It should be a sharp wake-up call to brands and their agencies that consumers want more—from both the people that are making and distributing ads, and from the media companies through which ads are delivered.
The answer is, on one hand, beguilingly simple: the data and technology needed to deliver great marketing experiences is, today, there for the taking.
But how to take best advantage of it is the real question: how to pull together the right data, analysed in the right way, executed in an integrated fashion across channels, with dynamically optimised messaging and creative as user needs and states change?
Let’s look at the component parts in more detail.
Better consumer insights come with clearer intelligence on your audiences, and that can only be done by better utilising the resources at hand. There is a host of valuable information at our fingertips, spread across all the data touchpoints in a consumer’s journey, from web browsing history, social media, customer databases, to even hyper-local targeting.
The power now lies with marketers to harness that information, and utilise it in a way that delivers a more personal experience to potential customers.
A robust data management platform integrated with an omnichannel media buying platform can help you better onboard, segment, analyse and activate data—whether it be yours (first-party), a partner’s (second-party) or a third-party’s data asset— across channels and devices. The ability to activate data right in media enables you to link audience profile data with media behaviour for smarter, better informed planning and buying.
Now that we have the power to learn more about our target audiences and find them across channels, we need to focus on creating ad experiences that are adaptive to changing consumer needs and states across the purchase lifecycle.
An omnichannel media platform enables holistic frequency management that ensures users aren’t bombarded daily with a high cadence of ads, whether it is the same ad over and over or a host of disconnected messages all from the same advertiser.
It also enables better ad sequencing to help marketers tell a story across channels that evolves as the user does; for example, by creating an emotional connection through a video ad that is followed with a related call to action in a display ad.
Consumers are already voting with a click of their computer mouse to avoid disruptive advertising, and advertisers and publishers need to answer their call for better, more relevant experiences. As marketers, it is essential that we take on the responsibility of delivering a better consumer experience.
If we do, we will be rewarded in the form of happier, more engaged, more loyal customers and, in turn, positive long-term business results. If we don’t, we risk losing consumer loyalty and trust and ceding ground to our savvier competitors.
The capabilities now available through programmatic marketing provide the foundation for making the entire advertising ecosystem a more enjoyable place to be. It’s up to you what you do with them.
[1] MediaPost, Advertising Industry Losing Billions To Ad-Blocking Software, 14 August 2015
