Ten years ago, the Chief Marketing Officer’s (CMO) role within an organisation was limited to coming up with a big creative idea. Today, CMOs are tasked with driving the top-line revenue growth for their organization and their biggest challenge is often measuring the effectiveness of their marketing. In an era where the average British household owns 7.4 internet devices, keeping track of the customers’ path to purchase, and subsequently measuring the success of an online marketing campaign is extremely difficult.
Due to this ongoing challenge, today’s media budgets don’t follow the eyeballs. Instead, they are directed towards platforms that offer reliable measurement and tracking, where the CMO can demonstrate a return. Even though consumers spend more time on smartphones than in front of TVs, mobile still only represents a quarter of the overall marketing budget. Mobile ads would be the best way to reach consumers where they’re spending their time but CMOs are still reluctant to allocate budget to mobile ads as they currently can’t track ad exposure to a sale.
This measurement issue can be seen throughout the digital advertising industry. Even though the marketing industry has been discussing all these tools to help track, measure and target everything, we still don’t have a great way to track how digital advertising exposure impacts an actual in-store purchase.
Therefore, how can digital marketers know if a consumer is buying a new laptop at the store because, perhaps, they saw an advertisement promoting that particular sale? Linking ad exposures to both online and offline sales will enable CMOs to prove whether an ad strategy is working. In fact, organizations that bridge this gap will have a competitive advantage in the market by being able to directly tie ad exposure to sales.
Which brings us to social platforms—the epitome of real time. Solving the problem between linking online and offline data comes down to registered users, and social platforms play a significant role in this given their scale.
With cookies, the best we get is a person’s designated market area, age group and types of online behaviour. Conversely, with registration-based sites, users supply names, locations, email addresses and interests. We also know what devices they’re using. These platforms provide a unique link that allows advertisers to check whether someone went into a store and used that same registration information.
People-based advertising is set to become a mega-trend over the next two to three years, as CMOs look for options beyond simple cookie-based targeting. This continuing shift away from cookies is helping drive this need for people-based programs and marketers who embrace this technology will be ahead of the game.
By Jon Schulz, CMO, Viant
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