By Gary Arlen
Excerpted with permission
At first, digital advertising was about cost-per-click, targeting and personalization.
Now, the buzzword is “marketing tech,” (martech) and the tactics involve sophisticated use of big data, including programmatic buying, geofencing, pixel tracking and retargeting with the ultimate goal of personalization: reaching a customer at the “purchase moment.”
“There’s an extreme level of complexity,” explains Greg Stuart, CEO of the MobileMarketing Association and former president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “It combines media buying with audience profiles, location data and dynamic creative design. It requires agile, ongoing marketing and a complete transformation of how marketers look at their organizations.“You have to have strong measurement and data analytics,” he emphasizes, acknowledging the new pre-eminence of “multitouch attribution,” which means that customers encounter marketing offers via mobile, smart TVs and other new media platforms as well as traditional ad formats.
The shift reflects the ad community’s revisions, contends Scott Kurnit, founder and former chief executive at Keep.com, About.com and several interactive cable TV ventures.
“Clever advertising to broad audiences creates solid word of mouth (or fingers)” and will be special long into the future, Kurnit says. “Digital is 100 percent measurable,” he says, but frets that it can fail to find new customers. Kurnit cites the tricky learning process, which includes developing standardized measurement processes to assure that they don’t “reduce innovation.”
Criteo points to the importance of multiple media presence. Its report on first-half 2016 digital marketing found that for the first time, shoppers used smartphones for most of their mobile transactions.
“Retailers need to create a truly seamless mobile and cross-device experience and be prepared to engage with users no matter where they are along the path to purchase,” says Elie Kanaan, Criteo’s executive vice president of marketing.
This article originally appeared in its entirety at cta.tech.
