We’re living in the digital era. The proof is all around us: mobile phones will outnumber human beings by the end of this year, and social networking has become so popular that if Facebook were a country it would be the third-largest in the world. The ubiquity of connected devices has changed consumer behavior, and their digital interactions are leaving contrails of valuable data that marketers can leverage to drive customer acquisition, reduce operating expenses, and make faster, better decisions. However, the sheer quantity of digital data available to brands is of little use unless they have the ability to process it and act on it instantaneously. How can marketers harness this influx of data and translate it into an asset for driving sales – in real time?
Over the past several years, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have provided marketers with programmatic media buying, using sophisticated algorithms to determine which ad placements are most likely to convert consumers and also drive the highest revenue.
DSPs empowered advertisers with transparency, access to exchange-traded media inventory, 3rd-party audience buying, and retargeting, and DataXu was first to extend these capabilities across display, mobile, social, and video channels. Advertisers running direct response (DR) campaigns were early adopters of programmatic buying for its reach, efficiency, and ability to target consumers ready to make a purchase. Brands, however, were more hesitant: was there enough premium inventory on exchanges? Could they ensure the safety of their brand by guaranteeing that their ads appeared in high-quality context?
Agencies started to commoditise DSPs, viewing them as tactical and low-value, judged only by performance without taking into consideration the strategic value of data, analytics, decisioning and automated real-time actions. DSPs earned the unfounded reputation of being cheap media-buying platforms with little entanglement or shared vision with a brands’ strategic long-term goals.
At the same time, the digital media space continued to fragment into more and more point solutions and categories, like data management platforms (DMPs), and attribution management platforms (AMPs). There was a clear industry need for consolidation and integration of all of these capabilities into a single, unified platform that would help brands leverage real-time data to drive profit. DataXu heeded this call by creating DX3 – the first-ever digital marketing management (DMM) platform.
DMM platforms combine the programmatic buying of a DSP with data management, attribution-aware buying, and insights and reporting. DMM platforms offer transparency into how a brand’s campaigns are run, with built-in brand safety controls and support for brand engagement-friendly rich media – making them suitable for both direct response and branding campaigns. They turn the constant influx of digital data into insight, and insight into immediate, intelligent action. DataXu’s DX3 platform, specifically, is driven by Active Analytics™, the ability to feed insights back into the system for immediate action, which enables brands to automatically optimise the ROI of their digital marketing investments.
Whichever DMM system you choose should be able to turn insights from consumer interactions with digital media into immediate action and continually learn and reset based on the freshest information. DMM can provide significant benefits to all types of brands, as the two examples below suggest:
A top 3 computer printer manufacturer
The printer company was able to shift mid-campaign to a more effective optimisation strategy as a result of analysing real-time performance. As a research component to a larger click optimisation campaign, DataXu’s DMM platform ran a brand survey against different audience segments. The brand lift data was so compelling that the client shifted strategy and budget toward a brand campaign.
- Takeaway: Without the opportunity to experiment based on data insights, marketers can continue down less than optimal paths, discovering months later that resources could have been better used.
- Segmenting populations to customise actions
Properly analysed, data allows marketers to identify increasingly granular customer segments. The era of 1:1 marketing is really upon us.
A national retailer
DataXu measured visitors to the home appliance pages of a major national retailer. After just a few days, DataXu’s real-time, data-driven decisioning platform was able to provide new, dramatic insights that reshaped the retailer’s marketing plan. For example, the retailer received a list of 3,000 3rd-party data segments that indexed highly against the visitors who had been shown an ad. Organised in related groups, these micro-segments offered the retailer a detailed roadmap to execute a campaign of precision audience buys with customised creative messages for each one.
- Takeaway: Without large volumes of tightly integrated 1st and 3rd party data, brands can’t segment audiences to uncover the kinds of correlations necessary to engage in customised marketing.
- Supporting human decision-making with automated algorithms
Algorithmic decision-making is not only necessary in the era of Big Data, it is better. And it frees marketers to spend time on strategy, analytics and creative.
The examples above demonstrate that the advanced use of audience targeting and campaign management techniques afforded by real-time decision-making can dramatically improve marketing efforts. However, no real-time revolution will happen until marketers commit to putting their data to work.
We’re in a demand-driven economy. If you don’t service the needs of your customers, your competitors certainly will. They may already be using a DMM platform to deliver a more relevant brand promise to better satisfy your customers, and you might not even sense that it’s happening. The transition to a fully-digital future will create winners and losers, and you cannot win if you don’t play.
