How many of us follow the same purchasing habits today as we did even five years ago? Very few. How many businesses rely on the same sales and marketing approach as they did five years ago?

More than you would think.

In the rapidly evolving digital era, the rules have been (and are still being) fundamentally rewritten. It used to be the supplier who created interest in their products and services, pushing out information and offers as part of lead generation campaigns. But now it is the consumer who is firmly in charge of their journey to purchase.

Of course, the availability of online information is at the root of this crucial shift in power. People prefer to ‘self-educate’ and decide when, where and how they interact with potential suppliers. Company websites, peer review sites, comparison tools and social media all play a role; indeed businesses that neglect social media platforms (and there are lots that still do) slam the door on commercial opportunities, and harm their reputation.

An overarching trend within the new customer journey is the growing appetite for authentic, personalised and emotional engagement with brands, especially in the realm of social media. A recent article by Forbesstated that 62% of Millennials “are more likely to become brand loyal if a company engages with them, sincerely, on social media.” There is still a role for brand promotion, but the balance between promotion and engagement must be carefully considered.

So, what are the six key stages of the new customer journey, and how can you optimise each opportunity?

1. Awareness

Brand awareness is crucial, so that your prospects have you in mind when they commence their research. Building awareness requires a nuanced understanding of your audience – such as which channels they use, their frequent pain points and typical needs. For certain sectors and channels, well-planned and executed brand promotion, such as paid advertising, will reap rewards. But as we introduced earlier, engagement via user-published and shared content often works better today than overt promotion.

Whether you are undertaking engagement or promotion work, it is vital to establish an integrated content strategy that encompasses digital and traditional media so that your messages and communications are consistent, informative and searchable across all channels. You should structure this strategy around a content calendar, so you don’t end up having to resort to ad hoc social media updates that don’t fit into a wider plan.

2. Interest

Awareness is not the same thing as interest. Once you’ve encouraged prospects to visit your website, blogs or social media, you need to analyse their initial interaction so you can glean information to inform your next move. Which touchpoints did they use? What content did they download? Web and social media monitoring tools can help to map prospects’ behaviours and preferences.

Engagement at this stage is crucial. On social media, encourage users to communicate with you by asking for questions and feedback. Endeavour to create a human connection with your prospects.

Providing helpful FAQs, downloadable information or easy to complete online surveys encourages would-be customers to engage with you. By completing a form or similar, people share information with your business about what they are interested in, giving you an opportunity to better understand their preferences and pave the way to that all-important sale.

3. Consideration

Today’s consumer is likely to verify your claims through a range of means, which is where peer reviews come in, and they may consult press articles, watch demo videos or read blogs. Improving your visibility and customer reviews on the right channels will help you to transition prospects to the next stage. Over 80% of consumers seek peer referrals before making a purchase.

Visual content works particularly well on social media as it stands out on social feeds. Any content should lead the prospect back to the information they need to help them make an informed purchasing decision.

4. Purchase

Purchase in the bag, it remains vital to analyse your customer’s behaviour and to deliver an excellent buying experience. Knowing which channels were used to make the purchase, how long it took and how satisfied your customers were, can be invaluable information to help you to improve the experience for other customers. At this stage you are laying the foundations for repeat purchases and long-term loyalty.

5. Retention

The average cost of new customer acquisition is on the rise; so it pays to hold on to your existing ones! Yet it is easier than ever for customers to ‘switch’.  Post-sale engagement activities can include sending further value propositions, product of service updates via email or offering compelling content on your website, blog or social media. Being aware of any problems at an early stage is also crucial; catch up meetings or calls can pre-empt this.

6. Advocacy

Consider how you can build loyalty and deliver ongoing value to your customers, for instance by regular account reviews, rewarding loyalty with promotional offers or by extra training, product add-ons and user videos. Customers love sharing good experiences – so ask them to write reviews, case studies or testimonials that can be used for PR, blogs, email marketing or website posts. On social media, keep engaged with loyal customers – those are the ones who are more likely to share your content.

Demonstrating that you have happy customers who are willing to be brand ambassadors is the ultimate way of encouraging more to embark on their journey to purchase.

In our experience, companies of all sizes are recognising the scale of the commercial rewards to be gained by understanding - and adapting confidently to - the new customer journey. Taking action now to update your customer engagement processes, supported by the right technology, will help to supercharge your growth and unlock the true potential of your business.

- by Mike Richardson

It’s an important objective imposed on marketers every single year – how best to squeeze every drop out of the annual budget.

Even industry professionals who, on paper, have more cash to splash, are still pressed to make their spend go further. And then there are those less fortunate of course, who have their budgets cut whilst the targets remain as competitive as ever.

So, whichever scenario you find yourself in, if you’re faced with a ‘limited budget’, what should the focus be in 2018/19?

If there isn’t enough money available to delve into every digital marketing channel, where should the priority lie?

The important thing to note is that it is possible to be effective, even when constrained by the purse strings. It all boils down to being clear about objectives and results.

Measurement

Before any money is spent on digital marketing, it is crucial to ensure the right measurement tools are in place – it’s impossible to optimise what you can’t measure.

So, set up Google Analytics if you haven’t already (and if you have a web partner on board that hasn’t done this for you, start the alarm bells ringing!) If you’re running an ecommerce site, GA should be tracking sales too, and on B2B websites, GA’s events and goals functionality will help to start analysing traffic conversion effectiveness.

It’s not just about Google though. Tools like Hotjar offer great insight into what users are doing on your website, for instance, which will help further down the line.

Start using a CRM

Another important consideration – particularly for marketers within B2B brands – CRM systems don’t have to cost the earth. Zoho is an affordable cloud-based solution for example, which will help establish a lead to sale conversion rate.

In the long run, such a metric helps measure the sales process all the way through the funnel, and therefore the underlying effectiveness of the marketing activity.

Don’t ignore lifetime value

An optional step before unleashing a digital marketing campaign, is to calculate lifetime value (LTV). By calculating what a customer is ‘worth’ over the duration of their relationship with your brand, it is possible to establish a more accurate cost per acquisition – in other words how much you can afford to spend per lead.

There are simple and complicated ways to arrive at such metrics – when time is tight a straightforward LTV is better than nothing.

Starting spending

A marketer can often make the most effective spend decisions when armed with reams of historical data, with which to compare new campaign ‘success’ to. In the absence of this data, it’s important to test channels and see which combinations are, ultimately, the most effective.

But the more limited the budget, the greater the need to be selective during this somewhat iterative process. With that in mind, and based on what is most likely to achieve the best bang for your buck, the following priorities should be given to marketing spend over the next year:

1. Conversion rate optimisation (CRO)

Marketing effectiveness can be assessed in terms of generating more website traffic or converting a greater proportion of existing traffic. Why not start with the latter? Even in the absence of any digital marketing activity whatsoever, a website should attract some visitors, so it makes more commercial sense to try to get more from them.

CRO can be very complicated, but in the interest of keeping things simple, ask yourself: ‘Do we have clear and obvious calls to action (CTAs) on our website?’

Then consider whether you could introduce softer CTAs. For B2B sites, a brochure download will always out-convert a quote request for example – you’re simply generating leads at a different stage of the user journey.

In ecommerce, start with the basics, e.g. do the product pages clearly tell a user all they need to know? More importantly, is it easy to buy?

There are tons of tiny changes you can introduce to make a site work better. Simple things like making buttons look like buttons and shortening contact forms as much as possible. Use session data from systems like Hotjar to review user experience (UX) and ensure results are measured following the implementation of tweaks.

Assuming the website is generating leads or sales at a healthy conversion rate (2% as a rough rule of thumb), then try to secure more traffic.

2. Paid search

From shopping campaigns and re-marketing, to text ads on Google and Bing, there is so much potential with paid search, at virtually any budget level.  There is usually a minimum baseline though – if you can’t afford to send enough traffic to generate a lead or sale, it will be difficult to achieve a return. But that’s where the LTV calculation will help – is it worthwhile bidding up knowing a client is likely to come on board for 12-18 months, for example?

3. Organic

Sometimes people refer to this as ‘free traffic’, which it really isn’t.

People finding you in a search engine do so because you’ve established a good brand or because they searched for something generic and you appeared on page 1. In either case it takes hard work to achieve that presence. So, expect great returns from organic traffic, but equally, be prepared for it to take time.

On a limited budget, do thorough keyword research and prioritise content creation including keyword progress that is achievable in the short to medium term.

4. Paid social

Thanks to the level of retargeting granularity in social channels such as Facebook, there is a lot you can do with paid ads in this space. Consider using an existing marketing database to create a look-a-like audience for example, or target a set demographic if you know precisely who you’re talking to.

In the interests of saving money, be selective in the social channels you home in on, rather than running paid ads across all. This activity will typically generate a lower conversion rate than AdWords, but the cost per lead/sale will probably be less.

5. Email

If you have email contacts at your disposal, use them! This is a fairly cheap way of communicating with lots of people and, with easily-editable templates available from the likes of MailChimp, it’s a quick process too.

In the B2B space, emails are a great way to remind clients and prospects of your brand’s proposition. In ecommerce there are vast options ranging from cart abandonment incentives to other promotional incentives. It’s a fairly cheap way of communicating with lots of customers.

Results will, however, vary upon the integrity of the email database and the quality of the email content.

6. Organic social

This isn’t just about sharing pictures of cute dogs. Good social activity should include thorough content and follower research and planning. Don’t just sell all the time, for instance, as users will better engage with posts that are interesting or offer some value.

Social media is also the platform most likely to require good customer service, as people will readily ask questions and complain if the response is unsatisfactory. There should therefore be a process in place to deal with the more disgruntled of keyboard warriors.

Of course, budget advice is most useful when it is tailored to the specific marketing objectives of the brand concerned. But when money is tight and general insight is required, this hopefully provides some interesting food for thought.

- by Andy McCaul

It is a new year and several e-commerce marketing teams are looking for improved methods of operating efficiently. Lightly resourced are these departments considering the number of marketing channels or tactics utilized to promote their products and brands.

They’re inundated with communicating plans, changes to plans by constantly updating and sending spreadsheets across the organization. These activities are literally occurring until final publication of content to all digital, social and mobile tactics. A highly time consuming and challenging activity to coordinate.

The purpose of this post is to shed some light on how e-commerce marketing teams are planning and executing digital, social and mobile marketing initiatives through using marketing calendar software to simplify their operations and allow teams to focus their efforts on devising strategies to grow their business.

Planning

Planning is a constant activity when it comes to ecommerce and retail. Beginning with an annual plan, followed by a seasonal plan and then execution occurring at monthly and weekly levels. These planning activities are essential in aligning the execution with the defined strategy for the marketing teams.

Typically during the annual planning stages, the marketing strategy team starts with a blank slate selecting campaigns and tactics from the previous year that they deem were effective and are aligned with the next year’s marketing strategy.

This plan is then altered to address the goals for the next year. Seasonal planning is an activity that occurs periodically through the year and requires marketing planning teams to analyze the previous season’s performance understand whether their strategies were effective, define seasonal events and promotions. In order to achieve goals for the seasonal plan, marketing teams would need to execute tactics monthly and weekly.

These tactics would include leveraging several digital, social and mobile channels to promote events and products for the ecommerce business.

Change Communication

E-commerce is a dynamic business, plans are constantly changing to ensure competitiveness and to cater to new trends. Unlike the traditional brick-and-mortar retail business, online retailers need to be swift and agile allowing for rapid shifts in their merchandising and promotional strategy.

Strategies such as lowering prices or advancing an event’s promotion sooner to attain market share typically require changes to originally planned marketing activities. These changes need to be easily communicated and synchronized across the organization for alignment. Managing your marketing plan through marketing calendar software allows ecommerce teams to effectively communicate changes across the organization and align all stakeholders within the process.

Downstream Integration

In order to achieve widespread adoption and eliminate the need to duplicate work across multiple systems, the marketing calendar software integrates with downstream systems to transmit the marketing messages and promotional content.

E-commerce departments that are able to define their plans in their marketing calendar and once approved, the information automatically propagates to downstream execution systems, eliminating the need to re-enter information and ensuring strategy and execution are aligned.

Performance Measurement

Measuring performance of a marketing initiative is a vital part of the marketing process and with ecommerce it directly relates to sales and margin. Ecommerce marketing teams are consistently measuring their marketing efforts to determine what worked or didn’t work. Also running test marketing initiatives can provide results that help marketers establish baselines and scale their efforts.

Daily & weekly KPIs for traffic, sales and average basket are overlaid on the marketing calendar to help illustrate the impact of marketing investment. Also, budgets and results for each initiative are incorporated into the marketing calendar tool providing a holistic view of the investment and return.

Each initiative depending on the type will have its own metrics allowing the marketing team to evaluate the level of success. For example open and click-through rates depict performance or effectiveness of email campaigns while a number of likes & comments depict the level of engagement on social media.

With the new financial year approaching, it should be time to consider how you can improve the productivity, communication and alignment of your marketing efforts with a marketing calendar software.

By the way, at CrossCap we have researched and put together a guide to marketing calendar software features, and we explained the benefits of each to help you make an educated buying decision.

- by Rahim Kassam

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s personal post on Facebook’s recent newsfeed changes, the social network’s share price fell as much as 6.1 percent.

With Facebook’s key advertising space for brands reverting back to its original purpose (actual, personal news from friends and family), the brand marketers who have relied on in-feed advertising to drive traffic and revenue must now reconsider how to engage with audiences through this pillar channel.

But more than anything, organisations must recognise this as an opportunity to take back control of their audiences, audience data, and engagement strategy. With GDPR on the horizon, there has never been a more opportune moment to build a proprietary customer database, find innovative ways to connect directly with consumers, and truly own your customer experience.

This is the beginning of the next era of owned media versus rented audiences. Marketers can build the right foundation through the following approaches:

Personalisation

A one-to-one relationship creates mutual trust and respect, and is proven to drive engagement that is more meaningful to consumers and to brands (read: revenue). Organisations utilising the full depth and breadth of their data better understand each individual user and tailor content for a more relevant, contextual experience.

For us, this means moving beyond ‘engagement bait’ that can erode relationships; and building and activating relationships that matter.

Better websites

As organic reach decreases on Facebook, the importance of having a central hub of content increases – but not just the traditional homepage, section, and article pages.

Publisher websites must be designed to convert traffic into known audiences, and this means learning from retail, ecommerce, and other industries. Quality content, SEO, overlays, and connectivity to email and mobile messaging must be in the mix.

Ads over articles

Instant articles will no longer be… so instant. With a shift to engaging a known audience, publishers will still be engaging and spending with Facebook, but in a different way.

Targeting and converting Facebook users into email subscribers is where we will see money being spent, all in a way designed to give brands the opportunity to own the data – and the experience.

Omnichannel approach

An integrated approach is more important than ever. Content delivered across mobile, app and email must be coordinated for every individual in real-time, as audiences shift sessions and channels. Creating a seamless experience for accessing breaking news, daily media, and evergreen content will solidify your relationships and your revenue streams.

Facebook has thrown curveball after curveball, but this change has the potential to be truly significant. That said, brands now have a real opportunity to take audience development into their own hands, rather than continuing to rely on social media platforms for support.

- by Marielle Habbel

2017 saw the tenth anniversary of programmatic advertising. From its humble beginnings, over half of all non-search digital ad spend is now made using the technology. The days of slow deals, subject to human errors and inefficiencies, are increasingly behind us.

But adtech’s story is far from over.

The next ten years will see new technologies that will fundamentally change the way advertising is experienced in our day-to-day lives, whether as media buyers or as consumers. It is our responsibility as technology providers to capitalise on these changes as best as possible, delivering what is becoming a genuinely helpful service by connecting consumers to the purchases they want to make.

By 2027, programmatic will become ubiquitous in the marketing sector. It will no longer be a line item on a media plan, but will be taken as a given by media buyers. Programmatic will extend its depth, moving into more channels such as DOOH, TV, Radio, and VR. It will also extend its breadth to more consumers, yielding more data across more localities to properly optimise successful campaigns.

Ditching siloed channels

Understanding the omnichannel user experience is already a must for any effective programmatic marketer. The way an ad is engaged with by a consumer, between, say, their desktop and mobile, is crucial for advertisers to understand to best optimise their campaigns. The ‘single view of the consumer’ across multiple devices currently spoken of will be a well-established state of affairs, with marketers having an accurate view of cross-device behaviour.

The way consumers engage with multiple channels will change too. A search for a product or service on their smartphone will instantaneously update the ads recommended to them when on their laptop or tablet. What’s more is that consumers will quickly raise their own expectations in light of these developments, demanding convenient, real-time offers and messages, and scrutinising ads which are irrelevant and unnecessary. The consumer will even start to see advertising as a core component of shopping, with smart refrigerators reminding them of the need to buy milk through an ad, having detected that they don’t have any.

By 2027, omnichannel marketing will have reached new heights as we increasingly inhabit a computerised world. Developments in VR are but one example of the direction of travel, not to mention the growing market in tech-enabled wearables.

The adoption of programmatic trading by out-of-home platforms such as billboards are another sign of things to come. This computerised environment will be all the more reason for marketers to ditch increasingly outmoded siloed channel strategies, with specific channel budgets giving way to unified ones.

Just 6% of television ads will be traded programmatically in 2018, according to eMarketer.

But even that stalwart of traditional media buying will itself look radically different in 2027. As video-on-demand and streaming services blur the lines between TV and online video, traditional broadcasters will adopt the media buying techniques of their peers in the video universe.

Most TV ads, by 2027, will therefore be executed programmatically.

Audience-first

Current trends towards transparency in the media buying process will continue to accelerate. Marketers will exercise their right to know where exactly their spending is going, asking for guarantees that their content is running on quality sites alongside brand-safe content. Marketers will take a fully audience-first approach to media buying, matching high-value audiences to the best media in brand-safe contexts. Cast-iron guarantees that ads won’t run on brand-unsafe sites will become the norm, with the legitimacy of sites verified by the likes of Ads.txt.

The media agency will take on a new, more strategic role in this changing ecosystem, partly as a results of machine learning, which will automate several existing tasks.

Brand CMOs will increasingly look to their agencies to share the best approaches to media buying, data management and measurement – seeking their advice, for example, on how to best utilise their tech stacks, or in developing new joint products.

As the world of technology, data, and devices expands, the agency is set to take a consultative approach, delivering holistic strategy and bringing the latest innovations and approaches in marketing to their clients for consideration. Agencies will need to be on top of neatly summarising the story in a complex trove of data, which can be easily relayed back to the relevant CMO and to the board of a given client.

2027 is, of course, still a long time away, and making predictions of this nature are never a precise science. However, by looking at the fundamentals of where the industry is going, and where we’ve come from in such a short space of time, we can have an idea of where marketing is headed. It’s the job of any serious marketer to take these trends seriously and make the best use of them for their customers.

- by Emma Williams

Each year, the data that marketing teams hold on their customers will degrade by around 10 – 20%. This is simply because approximately 1% of the population will die, 10% will move house, and email addresses and phone numbers will inevitably change.

Not all data will take the same amount of time to degrade. For example, details on customer segments, products or customer type will all deteriorate at different rates. The age of the data plays a part too. If it is over 3 years old then 30% of customers will have moved, so the entire database essentially changes address every 10 years.

It’s also not entirely equal. Data provided by existing customers may be more valuable to a business than that held against prospective customers, and this may vary between marketing campaigns.

With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect this May, it has never been more critical to keep data clean. Article 5 of the regulation states “every reasonable step…” must be taken to fix inaccurate data, but how can you know what to fix if you haven’t properly audited?

Here is how you can be smarter with customer data audits:

1.) Focus

Narrowing a data audit across either different products or customer types (such as active, lapsed, prospects etc.) gives a basis for comparing results. This means you also have grounds to justify investment from appropriate teams if needed.

Imagine letting a product manager know the address quality of the total customer base is 95%. They would probably consider that a good score, so no action needed. However, if you can use tangible proof to show that the specific product’s customer address score is just 80%, despite the 95% overall quality, you are in a stronger position to get the support and resources needed to look into why the product’s score is lower.

Focusing the audits enables marketing teams to benchmark internally across products and business areas, as well as spotting problems. If one set of individuals has purchased two different products, but there is a difference in the data quality, you are well placed to dig deeper into the issue.

Analysing other variables, such as contact data validation, opt-ins, field populations and distributions will provide a full perspective of the data. If the product manager sees there are email addresses against 50% of customers, for example, they may not realise if, say, only 60% are verified. In this instance, only 30 in every 100 customers might be valid, not 50 in 100 as originally assumed.

When comparing datasets of products, if some have more opt-in rates and a higher percentage of valid email addresses, it could be that something is wrong. There could be issues with the system that passes the data across, or perhaps the on-boarding or data capture processes aren’t working properly.

2.) Regularity is key

As a rule, the longer the time left between data cleanses the higher the cost will be, as more data will have degraded and will need to be fixed. It’s much better to be proactive than reactive, to avoid paying out higher costs.

You can use regular audits in the same way you would an exception report. If they are set up to automatically run they can fix and improve data quality when it drops below a certain level. For example, if the amount of invalid email addresses gets to 10% or telephone numbers drop below a 90% match.

This approach means the investment is frequent and regulated, so that a high level of data quality is self-maintained. When data quality is taken care of, it allows teams to focus on pending marketing campaigns, or elsewhere in the business that needs attention.

Frequent data audits are a vital way to monitor and repair any inaccurate data, and from May you could receive a fine under the GDPR of €20m or 4% of a business’s global revenue, whichever is greater. Regular data audits mean you are in control of your data.

3.) Maximise the value of the data

Auditing your data for its quality is a vital step, but it is just the start of understanding it fully. Other work needs to be done to get a holistic view, and the audit lays the groundwork for this.

A data quality audit will tell you that, say, 10% of telephone numbers are invalid, but a next step would be to conduct further investigation into this variable, to understand the distribution of values, and the formats used (e.g. +44, (01423), 1423 etc).

It may be that the field is inconsistent in how the telephone number is captured and stored and this can impact how much of the data can be actioned. Correcting the data at source to prevent more dirty data getting into your systems is extremely valuable. Equally, correcting data so it can be efficiently transferred across systems reduces the manipulation time analysts spend on correcting data.

Ultimately, a data audit is a great place to start. Coupled with a more comprehensive view of data variables, you can move towards a position of maximising the usage of your data, and maximising the returns on it, as well as ensuring you meet best practice and comply with GDPR.

- by Rob Frost

Many advertisers are now looking to internalise their mobile media buying processes, and numerous companies are being set up to offer advertisers a media buying service in the programmatic space.

There are two possible routes here, as in any decision that involves using technology: buy or build your DSP. But firstly, let’s define what a DSP actually is.

Because DSP stands for “Demand Side Platform” it should be intrinsically associated with technology-based companies that allow media buyers to purchase ad placements via bids in ad exchanges' real-time auctions.

However, many of today’s so-called DSPs don’t own a proprietary platform - and in some cases, they don’t own any technology at all. This is particularly the case in the mobile space, where programmatic technology was established more recently.

This causes considerable confusion for the ad-tech ecosystem. Any company positioned on the demand side of the ecosystem can call itself a DSP, independently of whether it owns a platform or not.

Advertisers therefore frequently assume they are going “direct” to the programmatic marketplace by using a “DSP” – but most would be very surprised if they realised how many players can be involved in the chain to providing marketplace access.

Building from scratch

Don´t get me wrong: if you want to be a player on the demand side, providing a media buying service to advertisers and agencies, it probably doesn´t make sense today to build your own technology from scratch, and your tech stack can offer a lot of value without being 100 per cent proprietary.

All I am saying is let´s call a spade a spade.

Many players are building valuable Media Buying Solutions, but the market is also full of examples that mirror the obscure world of traditional advertising, with never ending chains of Ad Networks working with each other as simple intermediaries - and calling every single player on the demand side a DSP just contributes to the confusion that allows these intermediaries to survive.

For those looking to establish a Media Buying Solution, it’s clear the choice of approach is a complex one, and the pros of one aproach are precisely the cons of the other.

The main advantage to building your own DSP from scratch is of course the fact that you gain full control over your offering. You own it, and as your needs change with time, your DSP will be able to adapt accordingly.

However, each of the components of the solution are fairly complex (in a constantly changing industry landscape), so if you decide to build entirely in house you need to be ready to invest in managing this complexity and its corresponding high costs on an ongoing basis.

It’s not just a one-time development. These are only some examples of basic things your in-house team will need to stay on top of, just for pure maintenance:

• each particular connection to a supply partner has its specific idiosyncrasies and is constantly changing, with changes often affecting different ad formats in different ways
• ad exchanges and publishers may change the rules of the game (e.g. the recent introduction of first price auctions or header bidding).
• ongoing challenges around tackling Ad fraud

A DIY build may be your only option if you have a very specific need that no other technology out there can accommodate, of course. But make sure you do not underestimate what it takes. Building is rarely the challenge – it’s making it work effectively that’s the tricky part.

From a wider market perspective, the downside to building from scratch is that if we’re all reinventing the wheel, rather than innovating and refining demand offerings, no real progress can be made to develop the media buying ecosystem - We all end up competing against each other instead of standing on each other shoulders.

Now, you could say that the level of maturity in the market today should be enough for most companies to prefer building a Media Buying Solution through partnerships instead. Even in the mobile space, which poses its own set of technical challenges, it has been six years since the first mobile specialist DSPs were started.

Partnering

Partnering means you can avoid dealing with low level elements that don’t offer differentiating value to your customers, freeing up time to focus on what makes your service offering unique.  There are enough partners out there with proprietary tech for this to be an option but you do, however, need to partner in a way that gives you enough control to provide that additional value.

Partner choice is key, because any partner that is an alternative to an in-house development must offer robust and effective technology, and advanced tools, whilst also offering you enough control to customise, differentiate yourself and add customer value.

This additional value can often be achieved by delivering a solution specifically targeted to certain segments of buyers, that can be tailored for the specific needs of that vertical, or offering enhanced value through innovative use of data.

Whilst working with a partner means you don’t have to deal with the details of the underlying elements that make effective programmatic media buying possible, those same granular elements might be crucial to differentiating your media buying solution from the many others out there - and this is the tricky part.

You need partners who can understand and cater to your needs (ie. if your audience is mobile, choose a mobile specialist), provide absolute transparency and granularity in reports and also equip you with the necessary level of control to differentiate your business.

They may be hard to find, but they are out there.

When adopting the partnership approach, it’s good practice to have two partners in place for the same element of your platform - firstly, as a ‘fail-safe’ mechanism and secondly to equip you with agility and the means to diversify.

In my view, as mobile DSP technology matures it will be those that partner well and build soutions  in a way that differentiates themselves from the masses that will rise to the top.

- by Noelia Amoedo

According to an analysis of YouGov consumer data by martech company Pure360 shows that the importance of imagery when it comes to the purchasing process.

YouGov polled 2045 adults and found that 53% think that images grab their attention more than headlines. 61% expected marketing messages to include photos or images.

In fact, 62% of respondents said that they would not buy from a brand unless they can see the product being sold in its entirety. The choice of imagery is important too, with 54% saying that they prefer brands that use product imagery over those that use lifestyle images.

Komal Helyer, Marketing Director at Pure360 said:

“With image sharing platforms like Instagram growing in popularity, brands are paying special attention to the power of a picture in marketing efforts to attract customers. Thankfully today they benefit from a plethora of technologies to deliver more relevant, interactive, responsive and targeted images.”

Public image

The importance of brand imagery is likely to grow in the coming years. A recent eMarketer report estimates that Instagram will account for a third of all global social media users by 2021.

The price for using irrelevant or ‘bad’ imagery can be pronounced for brands. 69% of respondents said that it makes a brand look bad if they use the wrong kinds of images. For 18% there are also certain colours they prefer to see brands use and not using them can have a negative influence on their view of the brand.

But if the choice of imagery is done correctly, it can be a strong driver of brand advocacy. 23% of the consumers surveyed said that they like to share images of items from brands they like online.

“A great image alone may well not suffice in resonating with a potential or existing customer,” Helyer continued.

“Consumers are used to a personalised experience and if an image doesn’t fit with the text around it and isn’t relevant to them, it could potentially damage their propensity to make a purchase. On the other hand, our research has shown that a decent number of British shoppers will share a picture from a brand they like when the image is right.”

- by Colm Hebblethwaite

The love affair between marketing and virtual reality (VR) has been blossoming for a fair few years now. So much so that these days it’s not uncommon to see VR included in a campaign brief.

Although VR may be high on the wishlist, not every brand can afford it. Or at least, that’s what they think. And yet VR is harbouring a salient but untapped secret: it can be used as a near-instantaneous content solution that, far from draining budgets, enhances long-term ROI.

For a seductive new channel that’s so tightly associated with vast budgets, this statement might seem to good to be true. But the truth is that once a brand has invested in its first VR experience, the initial outlay will pay dividends. How? By establishing – almost incidentally – a real time content pipeline that can create everything from apps to augmented reality (AR) for multiple departments within the same company, and all at the touch of a button.

Let me explain…

Time saver

Once assets have been digitized for a VR experience, the initial hard work is complete and these assets can go on to have a life beyond their original purpose. They become the foundations of a future-proofed content solution where everything is already in place to create multiple formats and versions of the original content further down the line.

This means that departments outside of marketing, from new product development to training via sales, can reap rewards from the upfront investment. But not only will they benefit financially; they will also benefit by gaining enhanced content. Imagine how much more engaging and effective training sessions or presentations would be if content were presented as powerfully immersive VR, rather than through a screen or pages.

Real-time data-driven content also has the added benefited of updating itself automatically, with users receiving a pushed notification alert. What could be simpler?

In addition to being an engagement-driving, company-wide and cost-saving initiative, this approach is also a significant time-saver: having a suite of ‘live’ digitized assets helps us shift from clunky linear workflows to real-time. That’s because VR experiences are heavily dependent on game engines: an amazing piece of software, long used by the video game industry, that renders content sequences in an instant. If it weren’t for game engines, video game players wouldn’t be able to control their avatars in real-time.

So, game engines are the magic ingredient that give VR experiences their real-time interactivity.

Getting started

Game engines are now so sophisticated that they’re capable of taking existing data assets and displaying them in near photo-real quality whilst simultaneously allowing users to interact with virtual products in real-time. Combine this with a powerfully immersive virtual world and you get a formidable tool for communicating brand stories and much, much more.

Many amongst you will at this point be thinking: “That’s all well and good, but how do I get started?”.

Fortunately, the answer is a lot simpler than most marketers think:

Brands often hold a library of useful but underused data; for example, computer-aided design (aka CAD), GIS or 3D product scans. We can use this existing and readily available data to create a VR experience’s building blocks by simply digitizing them into assets suited for real-time applications such as VR, AR and immersive apps.

When this approach is taken, it creates an unexpectedly low barrier to entry for VR, which begs the question: why is VR seen as a medium that’s exclusively suited to big established brands with their big established budgets? It seems rather undemocratic to me that only brands with vast resources can reap the amazing benefits that come from VR.

Digitized assets

Brand use of VR is, understandably, synonymous with a marketer’s two biggest goals: entertainment and engagement. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore VR’s more functional potential. Once there is more awareness around the fact that digitized assets can be combined with a VR game engine to create a myriad of content in a near-instant, marketers from brands of all shapes and sizes will be able to make a more convincing case for VR.

They will also be credited with developing an initiative that unlocks the industry’s much-talked-about-but-little-delivered imperative of digital transformation.

In an era when brands need to be ‘always-on’ whilst serving up endless personalization-driven multiple versioning, VR’s use as an automatically updated, real-time and cost-effective content solution becomes utterly compelling. And the ramifications could go far:

VR’s use as a content solution poses a threat to the conventional but highly inefficient model where brands commission agencies to create individual pieces of content. Once brand-world wakes up to VR’s secret functional side, they may feel so empowered by creating their own engaging content at speed and at cost, that agencies will feel the pinch.

- by Mark Miles

This year has been one of vast technological development across the ad tech industry. Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning have continued to establish themselves as key drivers of intelligent advertising and personalisation across the programmatic ecosystem.

Meanwhile, Blockchain technology has rapidly increased its presence across the sector and is now presenting advertisers with a host of new ways to both diversify and secure their platforms as they look ahead towards the next 12 months.

Progression of programmatic

The new year is also set to herald a new era of evolution for programmatic advertising technology.

Recognised by advertisers for its unprecedented ability to streamline the process of ad buying for advertisers worldwide, programmatic technology is now firmly positioned at the forefront of automated and data-driven decision making for advertisers, so much so that it is now predicted to account for 100% of all advertising trading execution by 2020.

Advertisers are not only embracing programmatic solutions to improve the efficiency of their ad spend; many are now also using the technology to address industry wide challenges, such as fraud, ad blocking and a lack of transparency.

Yet, a new year has begun and new technologies continue innovating, the once aggressive progression of programmatic advertising is beginning to decelerate. While it is still expected to grow at an average of 28% in 2018, hitting US$ 64bn globally, this rate is much slower than what we have seen in the last few years.

This is a likely sign of the technology entering a new stage of increased maturity, as it continues to prove its value within the sector.

GDPR and its impact on programmatic intelligence

The evolution of programmatic advertising technology will not only be impacted by its own loss of momentum. The forthcoming introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May is set to transform the way programmatic advertisers both collect and process the personal data of consumers. Once enforced, GDPR will require programmatic advertisers to be more transparent by obtaining active consent from customers for the use of their personal information, and will also give consumers the power to remove their accumulated historical data from any database they wish.

Yet, with today's programmatic advertising technology so inherently reliant on consumer data to provide intelligent and automated ad targeting, these unavoidable regulation changes may well undo much of the progress made in enabling automated and personalised advertising, which has been largely generated by the rise of the AI trend in recent years.

This machine-led technology is currently used by programmatic advertisers to collect smart data on consumers and tailor their messages accordingly and has been an asset to the programmatic ecosystem of late. However, the implications of GDPR could somewhat restrict the extent of the role that AI-driven technology plays across the sector in the future. This will create significant challenges for the innovation of programmatic advertising and could deputise its ability to offer advertisers an effective ad buying process.

With this in mind, I believe that today’s programmatic advertising technology can simply no longer provide brands with the level of both automation and transparency now required for success in the sector.

Coupled with ever growing concerns over fraud and transparency, it is now important that programmatic service providers welcome the potential of other emerging technologies, which possess the capabilities needed to address the aims of GDPR and ensure both secure and efficient advertising, to continue advancing throughout 2018.

Utilising Blockchain to enhance programmatic

One emerging technology that will undoubtedly have a significant impact on programmatic advertising in 2018 is blockchain. The technology itself has garnered many column inches across many industries since its conception a few years ago, and the ad tech sector is no exception. The nature of the technology can undoubtedly provide some obvious benefits for advertisers adopting programmatic strategies.

Its ability to create an immutable record of transactions and provide users with a full audit trail of every transaction makes it an instrumental asset to increasing security. By providing advertisers with an irrevocable receipt of transactions, blockchain can work to reduce or even eradicate the risk of ad fraud. What’s more, it also increases transparency over expenditure, by enabling advertisers to see exactly where their budget is being spent and exactly who they are transacting with.

With blockchain able to drive security and reduce concerns amongst advertisers over issues such as ad fraud and transparency, advertisers themselves will be able to devote more time to increasing the efficiency of their audience targeting and improving the personalisation of their advertising strategies. As more come to realise its benefits, it is likely that we will see a rise in the integration of blockchain within automated ad buying processes in the coming months.

As the digital advertising industry continues to strive for both successful automation and creativity in equal measure, it is vital that programmatic embraces the capabilities of new technologies to continue its innovation over the coming months.

Yet, with GDPR bringing new challenges surrounding the handling of consumer data and with the growing concerns over transparency and fraud still plaguing the industry, programmatic advertising as we know it will have to undergo a huge transformation to both evolve and remain dominant in the year ahead.

- by Zheng Zhang