No one can deny that ad tech has transformed the way brands conduct media buying. Gone are the days of sales calls and signed IOs. Today's automated world sees media transactions happening in milliseconds across a variety of devices and channels. Today, we're on the brink of yet another huge technological development, the Internet of Things (IoT), which will bring increased device/publisher fragmentation and more advertising opportunities. Nick Graham, global digital director at Huawei Technologies speaks exclusively to ExchangeWire about the things that keep brand-side marketers up at night

ExchangeWire: How do you think ad tech/martech affects the relationship between sales and marketing functions?

Nick Graham: Right now, things are transitional. I see sales teams reasonably happy to benefit from technology innovations in marketing (martech, ad tech, etc). Everybody is still learning on all sides. However, the shift from technology as passive support in the sales process to it playing a more active, profit-oriented driver of revenue can introduce accountability issues. For me, the key issue here is attribution of credit for sales. As technology-enabled marketing encroaches on the traditional sales function, the question of who gets the sales credit, or how it is shared, is crucial. I’ve yet to meet a sales rep who isn’t guarded about his or her commission.

If attribution is not addressed properly, then one risk is that future innovation is stifled. Technology’s role in sales and marketing processes needs to be accurately estimated, both as a contributor to sales value and as a contributor to user experience. User experience can be a significant differentiator in achieving strong customer loyalty and it increases in importance as more customer utility becomes digitised.

We should also keep in mind that the range of sales and marketing disruption is wide: B2B/B2C, various industry verticals, etc. Disruption to sales and marketing functions is happening differently across this range of businesses.

As our lives become more and more connected, what opportunities do you see coming to the fore for advertisers?

Emerging opportunities brought about by IoT are geared around direct response, or transactional, to go a step further, more often than brand. We’ve all seen reports and case studies about smarter homes, smarter white goods, smarter cars, smarter consumer electronics – all possessing functionalities like notifications for ‘self-replenishing of consumables’, ‘filling up with fuel’, ‘auto-ordering for subscription-like consumables’. These and many more examples present direct response opportunities for advertisers.

Perhaps less obvious will be the data from connected innovation that can be used for brand marketing and advertising. This could mean fewer purchase decisions for consumers with some buying decisions becoming near-utility. Brands will provide the trust for deeper relationships like this. The subscriptions model is hugely compelling for connected devices and will offer scope for intelligent baskets, well beyond our current click-to-order frontier. It’s not hard to see the gap between brand and response becoming more connected as a consequence.

It can still be difficult to measure consumer interactions across multiple devices; the IoT will bring more connected devices into the mix. Do you think marketers need to solve the measurement issue before introducing additional devices/channels into their marketing mix?

Introducing additional channels into the marketing mix will undoubtedly be independent of any measurement constraints. Even today, we deal with disparate data sets, cross-device tracking is only just realising itself, never mind true cross-channel attribution. Tools like econometrics, however challenged, are still in use.

The lesson that the IoT and other emerging technologies demonstrates is that solving the true value of advertising media is a harder nut to crack than many think. Naturally, for those marketers who have steadily been building attribution models, the world is likely to get more opaque. Marketers and corporations may have to gauge the true value of advertising touchpoints via their utility offered to customers. This will be a value exchange brands will have to decide upon.

What barriers can you foresee that could slow user adoption of the IoT?

User adoption of IoT will dependent on end-user value and, tightly related to this, on its end-to-end business proposition. For end-user value, the solutions and services will need to offer sufficient user value to make the behavioral change worthwhile. For end-to-end business propositions, the right partnerships will need to exist to create a viable value chain. In short, both supply and demand could affect affect IoT adoption.

There are also several secondary concerns, such as technology infrastructure. At home, slower networks will allow for testing of mostly fixed items. But to really maximise the true potential of the IoT, adoption will largely be driven by infrastructure capabilities. 5G is a requirement for true freedom for growth of the IoT. In a well-cited example, without 5G it is hard to imagine driverless cars, due to the latency of 3.5G and 4G; and developed economies have proved to be uncharacteristically slow to innovate with these spectrums and, more importantly, their commercials.

As a brand-side marketer, what keeps you up at night?

Getting the balance right between the science and art of marketing. This is a classic issue, but one that gets more pertinent as we venture down the path of tech-driven marketing. In our highly accountable world of internet-based marketing, it is only too easy to see everything as countable and measureable. This too often misses the point between creating something right and magical for your chosen audience and measuring its success. I think we should not pin everything on ROI; which, when we scratch the surface, turns out to contain faulty data, myriad assumptions, and conflicting agendas. Proving the value of advertising and marketing beyond end-user metrics is notoriously difficult and requires broader business understanding. Over-attribution is rife in our industry. Media metrics are increasingly important in marketing, especially in digital, and as a result we risk forgetting about bigger picture thinking. This is also what’s misleading about that over-cited quote of John Wanamaker.