I was recently approached by ClearCode.cc to discuss the differences between ad tech and marketing tech.
First of all, I love their blog format and the awesome visuals that come with the site. I particularly enjoy their font, the size of the font and the layout of the page!
We discuss the prevalence of audience targeting, the ability to leverage large data systems for very precise targeting, and the evolution of the advertising space over the last 5-10 years. We touch briefly on the complexity / sophistication situation. Sophistication is great because it gives many different providers great opportunity to make very customized solutions, but the complexity usually ensures that many players don’t actually understand what’s happening. The challenge, then, is to ensure all members of the ecosystem speak the same language and have proper understanding of the environment. In a space like advertising where solutions change every quarter this is difficult, but necessary.
Finally, the piece talks about future thinking in the marketing space, and I talk about ongoing consolidation, People Based Marketing and the evolution of Facebook ads as a world class advertising solution.
If we had the opportunity to continue the conversation for enterprise marketers we’re seeing that data management platforms become the critical infrastructure development necessary for smarter marketing. The DMP allows the enterprise to capture data from many different sources including: syndicated data providers, campaign level data and site connections. Using this infrastructure the enterprise is able to make connections between the different groups of prospects, CRM groups, users who submitted email addresses buyers from channel partners (say if you sell your product at Wal-Mart and Target you can get sales data). The DMP lets the enterprise understand who transacted and who is interested in transacting in the future. More importantly the DMP lets the enterprise understand the connections within its customer sets. Using data analysis the marketer is able to understand which of their current customers should be given specific offers, and who shouldn’t be delivered any offers. Then, data is passed into the demand side platform of choice, and the media partner buys the very precise media at scale.
Once campaign data is logged there should be a passback between the DSP and the DMP to make future advertising decisions smarter. So, whether the enterprise is a massive Fortune 500 marketer, or a smaller business access to these DMP feature sets is increasingly more important to the marketing work.
Another way the DMP is used is tied to the DSP, even if no segregated DMP is commissioned. DSPs like MediaMath, The Trade Desk and Turn are all equipped with DMP feature sets. Some sell their DMP separately, and others don’t. But the feature set remains valauble. In these cases the marketer is able to connect on-site conversion or site visitation activity to a slew of third party data segments for the purpose of creating look-a-like models. Much the same with buyers in Facebook use a Universal Pixel to segment audiences DMPs allow the marketer to create custom audiences that are used to target ads. This is important for activation among ecommerce brands when the user can commit to a purchase directly on site.
