With so much data at a digital marketer's disposal, programmatic is changing. With this change comes a need to remove the silos that exist between digital advertising data and customer data. As Michael Greene (pictured below), vice president of product strategy, AudienceScience explains to ExchangeWire, CRM can play a valuable role in digital marketing and, if used intelligently, can render technology such as DMPs largely useless.

The growth in programmatic, as it evolves to handle media buying across an increasing number of channels, is set to continue. A survey amongst global marketers earlier this year found that 66% had planned to increase their programmatic ad spend in 2016 (more than double the number that had such plans in 2015), stating that its time-saving optimisation and increased ROI were the main factors. And, as all media becomes addressable, the benefits that come from better targeting, and more relevant campaigns, make the automated advertising sector a thrilling one to be in.

What excites me most is that, while programmatic has already revolutionised media buying, it is set to revolutionise another area of the marketing ecosystem, with data and technology being the key drivers.

Marketers have been collecting vast amounts of offline data from in-store purchases, coupons, promotions, direct mail response for years. For many marketers, this has been a massively valuable asset, forming the basis of customer segmentation and enabling the attribution models that tie marketing efforts to sales.

However, this data – generally classified under the realm of CRM – has been largely siloed from advertising efforts. It’s been paid media’s job to bring in new customers (and their data) and CRM’s job to keep them engaged. All the while, marketers have adopted tools like DMPs to aggregate data from across newer addressable media channels – from display, video, mobile and, increasingly, digital TV, radio, and even Digital Out of Home.

But why the continued silos? With today’s business intelligence capabilities, and the quality and depth of data available across all media, you can raise CRM up the sales funnel so that it is no longer just about retention. CRM can now play an essential role in acquisition too – driven by programmatic technology that can drive ‘the right message, to the right person, at the right time, via the right channel’. In other words, programmatic is no longer just about campaign management, but has an important role to play in managing consumers across the whole of the customer lifecycle.

Michael Greene, VP Product Strategy, AudienceScience

However, few brands have managed to make this shift yet, as they tend to work in silos with acquisition and retention being handled separately. So, what do brands need to do to be able to take a truly joined-up approach to their customers by integrating programmatic and CRM? An approach many are now calling ‘CRM360’.

Move from a broad segmentation to personalisation against a segment of one:

As well as working in silos, marketers also have broad-stroke objectives (e.g. build brand awareness). As a result, they use large-segment media buys for the advertising, targeting people according to a specific demographic or behaviour. Typically, people remain in these segments and are targeted with group-based advertising until they actually make a purchase – at which point the CRM process kicks in.

However, with CRM360 you don’t wait until the purchase. As soon as an individual within a broad segment engages with a brand, in any way, they should be regarded as a segment of one, with activity triggered to tailor a different message that reflects this higher level of engagement and nurtures them to the next step across the appropriate channel. And this channel shouldn’t necessarily just be digital advertising – depending on the data gleaned from the individual, or their cookie ID, other channels, such as email, could be used to better effect. As programmatic evolves into ‘automated advertising’ this is a real opportunity.

The measurement of this activity, and the outcome it delivers, needs to be part of a holistic tracking capability across the whole of the customer lifecycle, identifying whether someone is in the middle of their journey (e.g. visiting a website) or post-purchase (participating in customer loyalty activity), monitoring this across all channels and linking them together.

Integrate data into the buying system:

Most advertisers have a technology stack with separate systems for managing data and buying media space. However, this disconnect causes a time lag of at least 24 hours before a brand can react to consumer interactions, which impacts on their effectiveness. In addition, with the way cookies work, this means that typically 30% of consumer data is lost before activity is triggered. To harness the full value of CRM360 it is, therefore, more effective to integrate data directly into one single buying system, built from the ground up, so that relevant communications can be tailored and targeted to consumers in real time, in direct response to their behaviour.

Continue to learn consumer attributes over time:

The better, and more complete, the data that a brand has on each of its customers, the better its CRM360 will be. However, there will be a different level of completeness for everyone and brands need to have data strategies in place that allow them to build and integrate their data over time, with their automated advertising and marketing evolving to incorporate new learnings as they happen. Be it historical attribution, deterministic data, behavioural data or purchase data – from both online and offline sources. For markets such as FMCG, where there are no direct sales, the latter can be tricky. It is eminently possible, though, by obtaining data from intermediaries, such as retailers, and tying this back to the brand's own individual online data.

Ditch the standalone DMP:

That said, another hindrance to this are DMPs which, though at the heart of today’s programmatic process, do not have the ability to complete a consumer’s whole profile and, as such, are limiting marketers’ ability to carry out CRM across the whole customer lifecycle. As marketers shift from managing cookies and device IDs to manage customer relationships, we are, therefore, anticipating the death of the DMP as it exists today. In its place we will see a central repository for ALL customer data spanning both known and anonymous consumers and the ability to activate that data via marketing channels in real-time. At AudienceScience, we can already provide a programmatic advertising automation tool that works across all data in real time, integrated with CRM.

Change performance measures:

Brands tend to measure acquisition and retention in different ways. While retention focuses on the individual consumer and their lifetime value to the brand, acquisition is measured in terms of ad performance rather than consumer value, using activities such as reach or click-throughs as a proxy for actual sales. This is perhaps the crux of why we haven’t yet seen many brands adopt this integrated approach. Once they understand the importance of tracking individual customer value across the whole customer lifecycle, rather than about campaign-based metrics, the push for a fully integrated and automated approach to ALL customer communications will come to the top of marketers’ agendas.