"future of marketing" entries
Actions predict louder than words
How server logs are making demographics obsolete.
Data isn’t just bigger these days; it is also fundamentally different than it was 10 years ago. The nature of this change is driving several innovations in the way marketing is done, particularly around targeting and measurement.
From a predictive targeting standpoint, ad tech firms are realizing that knowing a user regularly visits an investing blog and regularly searches for stock tickers is more valuable than knowing the age, gender and income of that user when targeting for a financial services brand. Traditionally, demographic and lifestyle data has served as a proxy for a good audience. With modern server logs holding behavioral data that tracks every last click, marketing firms can do away with the proxies and build audience segments with a high likelihood to take some sort of specific action — like converting. Ad tech startups such as Dstillery (full disclosure: the author works for Dstillery) and Rocket Fuel have based their respective approaches around this concept. Big data technology coupled with machine learning best practices has enabled the use of event-stream behavioral data to accelerate in the last five years. The market is starting to notice the value this approach is bringing, with Rocket Fuel being a recent IPO success story.
Better user-level targeting isn’t the only innovation brought by log file data. The digital promise of having better insight is slowly being realized by firms offering third-party ad effectiveness measurement. Companies such as Adometry and Visual IQ are pioneering the use of machine learning to model the causal effectiveness of ad exposures on user conversions. Using these models, brands can better evaluate which digital strategies are the most effective at driving up their ROIs. Read more…
Demographics are dead: the new, technical face of marketing
Technology has changed the way we understand targeting and contextual relevance. How will marketing adapt?
Over the past five years, marketing has transformed from a primarily creative process into an increasingly data-driven discipline with strong technological underpinnings.
The central purpose of marketing hasn’t changed: brands still aim to tell a story, to emotionally connect with a prospective customer, with the goal of selling a product or service. But while the need to tell an interesting, authentic story has remained constant, customers and channels have fundamentally changed. Old Marketing took a spray-and-pray approach aimed at a broad, passive audience: agencies created demographic or psychographic profiles for theoretical consumers and broadcast ads on mass-consumption channels, such as television, print, and radio. “Targeting” was primarily about identifying high concentrations of a given consumer type in a geographic area.
The era of demographics is over. Advances in data mining have enabled marketers to develop highly specific profiles of customers at the individual level, using data drawn from actual personal behavior and consumption patterns. Now when a brand tells a story, it has the ability to tailor the narrative in such a way that each potential customer finds it relevant, personally. Users have become accustomed to this kind of sophisticated targeting; broad-spectrum advertising on the Internet is now essentially spam. At the same time, there is still a fine line between “well-targeted” and “creepy.” Read more…