Audience information is gold, but only if it is used in the right way and many of the more traditional marketing solutions are sadly guilty of treating channels as standalone silos when a multi-channel approach to marketing is far more effective.

Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) make it possible for marketers to really coordinate messaging and reach target audiences with an unparalleled precision by leveraging universal parameters, increasing efficiency and controlling user over-exposure. Whatever a marketer is looking for, whether it is performance or brand awareness, DSPs make it possible to execute campaigns across multiple media channels which also include real time bidding (RTB), ad exchanges and premium publishers.

Cross channel targeting and reporting is key to unlock the potential of digital marketing but it is not the only one in our space. Systems such as the Turn platform enable display buyers to maximise efficiency and performance by putting a powerful media management platform at the centre of their digital efforts, giving users more control than they have ever had before. We all know how cumbersome and time consuming it is to book a campaign across different digital channels – this holds even truer in very fragmented markets such as Europe, where most budgets are still small in comparison to what we are seeing over in the US but the amount of work involved during the trading activity is the same if not greater.

DSP technology can be leveraged to take advantage of programmatic buying as a new and much more efficient trading channel for digital marketing. It eliminates the cost inefficiencies in online display and means European digital marketing organisations now have the opportunity and the tools to scale their operation and finally make this really work both for them and their customers - which is something many are welcoming with open arms.

The highly insightful reports provided by DSP platforms such as Turn help marketers to really understand how best to spend their advertising budgets. In tough financial times globally, planners and buyers need better insights to understand how they can really reach their audiences cutting media budget waste to a minimum and this in a nutshell is what Turn’s DSP deliver.

The other sector where we at Turn are seeing considerable interest in within Europe and globally is the field of Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

DMPs solve several challenges for marketers in today’s complex multi-channel environment and this is one of the key reasons why both the technology for marketers emerged in the first place and why the sector is growing at such a phenomenal rate.

The holistic, 360 degree view that DMPs provide enables marketers to powerfully leverage the still as yet largely untapped audience information stores that they possess - and though data from customer relationship management (CRM) has been leveraged for decades to power offline direct marketing campaigns and email marketing it is only now demonstrating the full scope of its potential.

CRM includes information on customers from past purchases regardless of where they bought a product, such as on the website, in a store or from a catalogue.

Now these rich audience information resources can be activated and leveraged in a digital format as well as through coordinated display, mobile and video campaigns to target catalogue recipients. This enables cross-channel marketing between online and offline campaigns as well as re-engaging with lapsed customers through digital marketing campaigns.

One of the other key challenges of today’s fragmented, multi-channel world is audience design. The vast majority of today marketers design their target audience at the inception of a campaign, but this brings with it the challenge of using a variety of separate tools available for multiple platforms, such as mobile, video, multiple DSPs, premium publishers, email and others. This creates imperfect surrogate audiences which never fully match the initial design outline. With DMPs such as the Turn platform, a marketer can actively design an audience using their best asset - CRM and combine that with best in breed third-party data.

This singularly defined, uniform audience can then be synchronised to all integrated media channels and providers, content delivery systems and ad servers and centrally designed audiences also make it possible for marketers to have consistent marketing messaging across channels. So to provide a real world example, our system means that the likely audience for BMW X5 ads will always get BMW X5 ads and not Ford Fiesta ads.

Another advantage of centralised audience design is that it targets consumers at every stage on the way through the purchase funnel – from awareness to consideration to action and ultimately to driven loyalty. This means the marketer can ensure that they obtain targeted messages that speak to them and reflect their current position in the funnel. This also has the added benefit of allowing marketers complete control as they move from branding all the way towards particular product offerings and cross- and up-selling.

Historically, the digital environment also lacked centralised reporting and this is another issue that DMPs address. DMPs centralise all of the campaign performance data across all integrated channels, providers and ad servers. This ensures that marketers no longer need to spend several days each week gathering the previous week’s campaign results, jockeying with the results across multiple Excel sheets just to obtain a clear and unified view of the campaign performance.

The beauty of DMPs is that audiences are centralised into a unified reporting and analytics platform, enabling pinpoint targeting and the option of rapid re-design of target audiences. Marketers can adjust budgets in real time as they see fit which is a real ‘game changer’ and the effects of this technological paradigm shift are likely to be felt within our industry for years to come.

In summary, real-time, second to second audience planning means digital marketers now have at their fingertips the ability to continuously refine campaign execution and the ability to innovate and move beyond the simple and outdated re-targeting models of the past.

Now is an incredibly exciting time and the multi-channel marketing solution marketers believed was just a pipedream a decade ago is in our hands. We can all agree a revolution is taking place within the sector and right now the possibilities feel almost limitless.