How Far Will One To One Marketing Go?

In this opinion piece JJ Eastwood, managing director, ANZ at programmatic company Rocket Fuel discusses how Artificial Intelligence assesses the value in our daily moments.

For decades the seemingly impossible goal for every marketer has been genuine one-to-one communication at scale. Simply put, we have all been looking for the ability to engage individual customers and targets on a personalised basis.

A pretty lofty goal, but one that actually became a reality in recent years with the introduction of Real Time Bidding (RTB). RTB has made it possible for advertisers to automatically bid on every digital ad impression, based on what they know about the individual about to view the ad.

This has meant that first-party data is now more important than ever to marketers, as is the technology to make it actionable.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence consumers expect an exclusive, personalised experience tailored to their preferences and needs, no matter where, when or why they are accessing your content. It follows then, that targeting the right individual based on their profile alone is not enough anymore for advertisers.

What marketers actually want right now is an understanding of when the right moments are to connect with consumers.

Focusing on moments means a marketer’s success is going to be dependent on their ability to understand the precise time a specific individual is likely to perform a defined action. In order to do this, marketers need to look at a more complex set of parameters than pure profiles, to make split second decisions about which ad to show on what device, and at what time.

The same customer may be much more or less valuable depending on the context — such things as recent activity, current website or app, time of day, weather, and other contextual factors. By blending this data together with behavioural, demographic and first-party audience information in a single model, it is now possible to effectively score every potential moment of engagement in real time.

What this means is that essentially each opportunity to show an ad is the moment that is being scored. Advanced machine learning algorithms continuously improve Moment Scoring– a term we use at Rocket Fuel – by learning what has worked in the past to inform and enhance the next marketing moment of influence.

Due to the amount of data that needs to make this a reality and the speed of the decision-making, machines are clearly best placed for this job. This doesn’t mean, however, that human input is redundant.

The process of machine learning needs human comprehension, capable of observing what factors come into play when influencing a purchase decision and adapting the parameters, messages and creative in order to fine tune and optimise the results.

In a digitally connected world, the amount of advertising opportunities are increasingly abundant and therefore success is derived from the ability to define the real value of each impression. With programmatic trading marketers can now see individuals up to 100 times a day on various devices, so the questions now becomes how likely are they to respond to your ad in each of those moments?

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