As advertising’s brightest minds gather for Advertising Week, expect plenty of comments on how data will be the key contributor to brand success moving forward.
In an era when the capability to precision-target customer segments is the most effective way to get your message across, data became a way for brands to set themselves apart from the competition.
Now, data and research is doing so much more than predicting outcomes and evaluating results. Moving towards this upcoming Advertising Week event in New York, major brands and marketing thought leaders are using research and data to discover tools for building bold strategies that will drive the future of the industry.
A Push for Programmatic
Programmatic ad buys have moved from an experimental exercise in making real-time buying less tedious into a full-blown digital strategy. Now, programmatic is moving away from the frontier and finding its place among traditional venues like TV advertising. In fact, publications like Advertising Age are predicting that programmatic ad buys will account for $2.5 billion of total TV marketing spend in 2015. They anticipate that number to swell to $10 billion by 2019.
These developments symbolize the adoption of programmatic from the “fringe” of digital advertising into the core of the industry. People like AOL Platforms CEO Bob Lord credit this growth to the precision-targeting abilities of “programmatic data to define the when and where of strategic ad placement.” Using heaps of historical behavioral data to anticipate consumer reactions regarding ad placement helps brands achieve the best ROI possible from their ad spend.
The next step, according to Lord, is for developers to enable marketers to “effectively leverage data to overlay the most compelling creative on top.”
Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Another “superpower” data has bestowed upon brands is the ability to attribute consumer actions across multiple platforms. The catchy refrain from Cheers may be an unwelcome prospect for some die-hard privacy advocates, but if brands were able to develop true convergence, then they would only try to reach a customer through the most relevant means possible.
This deep level of segmentation will set brands apart in a world where “a fragmented and anonymized view of their audiences across disparate media channels just isn’t cutting it,” in the words of AdBrain’s Paul Turner. By tracking users across the devices they use, more authentic and organic-feeling marketing campaigns can become the norm. Since many brands are discovering that relevance is the only realistic way to create worthwhile conversion rates and generate strong ROI, brands that are able to piece together 360° perspectives of their prospective customers will likely have a huge competitive advantage in the marketing climate ahead.
Disruptions like these will change the face of digital marketing as we know it and place immense pressure on brands to continuously innovate in the way they capture and leverage data. As some of advertising’s brightest and most prescient minds gather for the upcoming NYC Advertising Week event, expect plenty of similar comments on how data will be the key contributor to brand success moving forward.