Delivering on the Promise of 1:1 Marketing with Mobile, Digital Signals and Programmatic.
A whitepaper co-authored by Phil Hendrix, Michael Becker, and Greg Serandos.
Most of us are all too familiar with the legacy of "media-centric" approaches to brand marketing and advertising. Marketers, in partnership with their agencies, develop and run marketing and advertising campaigns on media whose audience and readership purportedly match the marketer’s target customer segments. After all, the media is the message. Or is it?
In the legacy approach, the marketer’s budgets are allocated across media properties using fixed media mix models and campaigns executed as scheduled. Results get tallied in the interim and at the end of campaigns, sometimes weeks if not months later. This media-centric approach to advertising – buying media in hopes of reaching a target audience and executing campaigns in a linear, predetermined fashion – usually falls far short of the marketer’s expectations and objectives. A large proportion of ad impressions reach consumers who are not in the target
market and only a small subset of consumers notice, much less respond, display ads. While this legacy approach generates exposure, the end result is similar to that of a billboard on the highway – it’s seen but doesn't really register, generating brand exposure at best.
In contrast to the linear, media-centric approach, forward-thinking marketers are now employing a new approach to advertising that is data-driven and customer-centric. By putting individual consumers at the center of their plans, marketers are buying media not with the promise of reaching their ideal target customer. Instead, they are buying “customer moments”and serving contextually relevant advertising and offers directly to individual target customers when that customer is most likely to engage.
This new advertising approach, sometimes referred to as programmatic, performance, or direct response advertising, is yielding remarkable results:
- Working with a well-known travel client, Taptica used machine learning (ML) based prediction algorithms to find and reach customers most likely to engage in revenue-producing “postinstall” actions. Over a 12-month period, their efforts drove CPA (cost-per-action) down to 1/10 of the initial cost – put differently, for every $100 spent the advertiser is now getting 10 engaged users instead of the 1 obtained with previous methods.
- Using visitors’ current location (within geofences), proximity history, and in-app behaviors, the US Open Tennis (working with partners Urban Airship and Gimbal) achieved open rates of 53% and click-through rates of 32% to rich, in-app “Buy Now” messages, a 10-20x improvement over industry norms.
These examples reflect a major shift in advertising from “hope and trust” to “test and learn.” Marketers no longer have to buy media in advance based on fixed media modeling, hope the media mix is the right one and settle for average results of uncertain value. Instead, marketers can leverage automated systems that, in real-time, leverage data to place relevant ads, offers and messages when and where targeted, individual customers are most likely to respond. This customer-centric approach to advertising is driving views, subscriptions, downloads, installs, store visits, purchases and other results that matter to marketers.
Marketers are shifting from targeting segments, buying audiences, and
other “old school” practices to finding, choosing and investing in the
most opportune moments with individual consumers.
With the platforms discussed in this whitepaper and related advances (see, for example, recent announcements by Facebook), marketers can realize the potential of data-driven, customer-centric advertising. Sponsored by Taptica, the whitepaper describes the key platforms that make this possible, shows how the platforms work together and identifies partners and resources that can help you put data-driven customer-centric advertising into the heart of your marketing and advertising efforts.
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