Important, Growing and Broken
In this week’s ADWEEK I came across a group interview conducted over Slack between reporter Ronan Shields and marketing technology experts from Salesforce, Xandr, Oracle CX and IPG.
The lead-in said that, according to a recent Gartner CMO Spend Survey, an increasing share of marketing spend in 2019 will go to “marketing innovation”.
That’s good because there’s always a better way.
I continued reading, hoping the group would come up with a consensus about what, specifically, counts as marketing innovation.
Because the interview took place the week before a big global martech confab (DMEXCO), they focused on the convergence of adtech and martech.
That is, the coming together of technologies that are used to (adtech) acquire new customers and those used to (martech) grow them into long-term valuable relationships.
For the most part, these are not connected today because they are operated across different touchpoints, by different departments.
Advertising’s touchpoints are in paid media, usually operated with external agencies and publishers. Customer engagement touchpoints are typically in direct channels, operated by in-house cx’ers using marketing automation platforms.
The interview has kept my interest because of the diversity of good ideas it captured.
Is something broken?
Yes, marketing to anonymous prospects and marketing to known individuals are disconnected. And they are not easy to put together because adtech powers an externally-mediated model and martech typically powers a direct communications model. (I am generalizing here for the sake of sensemaking.)
How could they be brought together?
Technically it requires managing Customer and Prospect IDs across the journey. Enabling personalization, which drives conversion. And using shared metrics that are meaningful across departments to measure performance.
What are the blockers?
Walled gardens that tend to dominate a channel (search, social, video) can be blockers, but we haven’t yet seen one dominate across all touchpoints to become a “single source of truth” for customer engagement.
Is there a workaround for this?
Better management of first party data should be a high priority for brands. Otherwise they will have to pay a high toll to connect with their own customers.
What is next step?
To use a sports analogy, we are in the first half of the game. There is lots of consolidation happening. For example, Salesforce acquired Krux and Datorama. Marketers should focus more of their innovation efforts on understanding and improving how their prospects become valuable customers. And providing relatable marketing that is conducive to that.
