Audience Data is Dead. Now What?
How Brand Can Survive and Thrive Without User Targeting?
It’s official… the cookie has crumbled, IDFA is in a coffin buried deep in the ground, and GDPR has crippled any leftover semblance of user targeting.
Advertisers are grappling with a new reality after tech companies, supported by most of the general public, waged war against targeting users. It is somewhat ironic that those same tech companies built and sold advertisers the weaponry they needed to provide a personalized advertising experience, and now those behemoths are recalling their products, leaving advertisers on what appears like a desolate, ravaged battlefield.
That is the feeling, but is it the truth? And is all the fanfare and drama surrounding it really warranted?
Marketing Data Then and Now
The rise of big data over the last decade captured the advertising industry’s attention, and brands began to rely on it extensively. The last few years saw industry players invest heavily in data management platforms (DMPs) and customer data platforms (CDPs) to help them identify users and deliver personalized messages to each user. Those platforms will no longer be the center of the advertiser universe.
While it’s true that advertisers are now acutely handicapped in terms of using audience data to drive their campaigns and show ads to a specific audience, digital advertising can still produce significant revenues for brands who understand how to capitalize on this new paradigm.
Marketing needs to reinvent itself, but there are opportunities abound for those who understand how to take advantage of them.
Consider for a moment that all the data we collect is like an iceberg. Audience and user data are just the tip. With that section now melted away, what lies below? An enormous amount of valuable data!
The rest of the iceberg is filled with layers of big data created by every marketing activity. You can and now must collect the data produced from your media mix, from your budget (and how that budget is allocated across channels), from every channel you activate, from campaign configurations, from campaign creatives and messaging, and so on.
However, perhaps the most important data you collect is from the results of all the media you buy — not at the single-user level — but at the aggregated event level, such as how many impressions and clicks were earned or how many landing page visits were captured. This data shows you the quantitative aspects of your media efforts in a big picture format. The quality and the precision of this data are far superior to the uncertainty of audience data. In an anonymous world where prospecting campaigns live, the user in front of your campaign is unknown until you collect their name, email, or other identifying information.
The hype around audience data served the marketing industry well for the last ten years because no one put it at risk. Now, that notion is rotting away, but as the saying goes, ‘from death comes life.”
Reprioritizing AdTech Stacks: Automation and Intelligence Tools Should Take Center Stage
Multichannel digital advertising is more critical than ever before. However, the complexity of managing such campaigns, particularly on a large scale, is excessively cumbersome. Even the most talented team struggles to manually manage and merge different channels and media into a single campaign. An automation tool can do this operational and time-consuming work for you in a much more efficient way without any drawbacks.
Campaigns produce a massive amount of data, so you need an intelligence tool with AI or machine learning algorithms to analyze that data. The data you collect will become the base of your advertising equity, which today is rarely owned by brands who use agencies to run their campaigns.
Bringing automation and AI solutions into your ad tech stack allows you to in-house your advertising, making you the owner of your campaign data, not just your audience data (which again is now less valuable). Every step of the digital campaign process is now mature and orchestrating campaigns across different ecosystems is pivotal. That makes this an opportune moment to in-house automation and reap the rewards.
Having the ability to automate campaign workflow processes and all aspects of digital advertising, from configuring platforms to budget allocation and calculations, will be a significant factor for success as we replace the old version of user targeting. Campaigns have their own unique lifecycle, and AI will provide you with better performance as it monitors and adjusts campaigns 24 hours a day.
By adopting these two critical technologies, automation and AI-powered intelligence, you will be able to optimize your campaigns in brilliant, scalable ways. This will produce superior campaign performance, lower costs and save time while freeing up your most talented employees to focus on revenue-driving strategical plans and outcomes.
Ultimately, AI and automation will create less wastage, making advertising specifically and the company in general far more sustainable.
