Not all is lost for ad tech. Gareth Davies, co-founder and CEO at Adbrain, (picture below) sees a way out of the identity crisis and suggests five approaches to improve customer-marketer relations. 

As ad tech and martech collide, an existential identity crisis is underway. Public ad tech valuations are crumbling, money is flowing to martech, and many an ad tech company is rebranding.

Rather than fuelling the fires of hype, let’s take a look at the five fundamentals:

1. Convergence of technology
2. The CMO as Chief Experience Officer (and future CEO?)
3. Mass personalisation
4. The tech just needs to work
5. Relationship shifts (it’s not you, it’s me)

Convergence

Consumers are in control. Mobile devices, powered by infinite computing power in the cloud, are augmenting our very biology, changing the way we expect to engage with content, products, and services. Mobile devices and the smartphone in particular have become the control centre of our digitally connected lives. We demand seamless, real-time interaction, and the lines are rapidly blurring between content, advertising, online, and offline experiences. Do you want to buy a set of golf clubs on your phone and have them delivered in an hour, followed by relevant follow-up offers and directions to your next tee time? Or, have your groceries delivered in an hour, along with recipes and advice on how to cook that perfect meal? Of course I do, and why did I have to wait so long for Amazon to offer me Amazon Prime Now? Witness the rise of convergence, and it’s making us incredibly impatient.

The CMO as Chief Experience Officer (and future CEO?)

With convergence the defacto norm, customer experience is increasingly at the forefront of modern marketing. Gartner recently found that 89% of companies would be competing on the basis of customer experience in 2016. Likewise the Economist Intelligence Unit found that three-quarters of consumers said that they would stop doing business with a company in the event of a poor customer experience.

Which begs the question of who owns customer experience? Today’s customer experience spans so many channels – desktop web, social, email, mobile, face-to-face, and in-store. As a result, the CEO, the CIO and the CMO are all taking notice. Standing still is not an option – building a coherent cross-channel experience takes time, investment and technical expertise across multiple business domains.

Mass personalisation (is not an oxymoron)

As evidenced by the failure of Apple’s iBeacons product, consumers tune out marketing messages from even marquee brands if they feel that the messaging is not sufficiently tailored to them; leaving CMOs responsible for powering one-on-one interactions with their customers at scale. Mass personalisation is indeed the holy grail, but convergence means we need to get there faster.

Delivering personalisation at scale depends to a large extent on the quality of both the technology and data a CMO has at their disposal. The days of blindly spending ad budgets, independently of broader marketing initiatives, via non-transparent third parties, are over. CMOs must be able to combine all of the data they have on a customer, across all of the touch points and media channels that they use, and use that data in a way that drives brand engagement and bottom line sales – all with a fully transparent and universal feedback loop, powering everything from universal reach and frequency measurement, to real-time personalisation and optimisation of content, offers, ads, and experiences.

Oh, and the tech just needs to work:

With the shift in organisational alignment moving from the data-hungry CIO to the customer-focused CMO, never before has alignment between the CIO and CMO been more critical. Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will be outspending the CIO in technology buying power. With today’s universal, customer-centric data initiatives, the CMO needs immediate, relevant insights and the tools to alter and refine their campaigns – paid or otherwise – across any channel or touch point, digital or not. It’s time to move beyond the ad tech metrics of CTR and CPA and instead deliver on broader cross-channel, cross-device engagement metrics.

Given that any of today’s CIOs lack the strategic focus to deliver this, it’s up to the CMO to make the vision a reality; but the tools and data need to be seamlessly available. As we’ve seen, the consequences of failure can be severe. Bandwidth-constrained customers on mobile devices resent having to use their data allowance to receive ads, turning to ad blockers in droves. Make the experience relevant and value-adding, and people switch on, not off.

Relationship shifts (it’s not you, it’s me)

Much has been said of the evolving agency/tech vendor/walled garden relationship with the marketer. And rightly so. Programmatic and audience-based ad targeting has tilted the power balance, reshaping the very business models (both for better and worse) of those who serve at the bequests of marketers. Traditionally, the agency was the CMOs right arm and part of the daily execution within the company. Today, all too often agencies are executional partners responsible for campaign delivery and performance accountability, compounded by narrow performance KPIs, not strategy and insights. Witness the rise of the Marketing Cloud vendors and Big 5 Consultancies. CMOs are expanding their tech and service partnerships, and for good reason. This doesn’t mean that agencies don’t play a pivotal role in the CMOs success, but the rules of the game have changed.

Powering the next wave of marketing technology

There’s no doubt, marketers are faced with a real opportunity to benefit from the martech/ad tech convergence and need to:

– Own and control their cross-device, cross-channel customer data.

– Build that single consumer view.

– Identify, target, and measure across all media channels, devices, and media/technology partners.

As technology companies and partners to the CMO, we need to ask ourselves, how best to support them? Far too often we, in ad tech, risk introspective navel-gazing, debating whose algo is better than whose? And don’t get me started with the intricacies of headerless bidding. We’re not speaking the same language as those we exist to serve. Instead, we should spend more time embracing marketing convergence and think about the very consumers our marketer partners are trying to reach, respectful of consumer privacy and preferences.

Ultimately we all need to be powering a better one-to-one interaction between the customer and marketer.