KBM Group, a data services business and division of Wunderman, revealed its partnership Wednesday with Provenir, a move designed to improve the predictive targeting capabilities of the former’s IMPACT 360 Customer Engagement Platform.
The partnership, the companies hope, will enable brands to consolidate interactions that occur across numerous channels like mobile, social, display and more traditional touches like contact center and search.
“For all of these types of interactions we record the identity of the consumer, the campaign that drove the interaction, what message or content was presented and the result of the interaction,” said Caroline Worboys, SVP of customer intelligence at KBM Group. “In this way we create a longitudinal memory of the building relationship between the brand and the consumer to create and continually enrich an actionable profile for the consumer.”
According to Mark Smith, president of Provenir’s customer engagement business, the company partners with four out of five of the largest global agencies, which predominantly service data-rich verticals such as travel, CPG, airline and retail clients.
The KBM Group-Provenir partnership solidifies a trend wherein agencies deploy digital marketing tech in-house to help wrangle online and offline data streams and enable predictive marketing through agency-built tools.
Publicis Groupe, for instance, revealed Wednesday its portfolio of agencies would package Adobe Marketing Cloud products within an “Always-On Platform” and license Adobe’s AudienceManager as the holding group’s collective data-management platform. Similarly, Havas teamed up with cloud-based tech provider Provenir to construct data-driven customer hub FULCRM.
Modern agencies manage a variety of offline and online data points for clients, including CRM databases, media impressions and third-party data sources. As these datasets intermingle, agencies constantly need to upgrade their in-house tech. Consequently, maintaining a centralized data repository is more of a need.
Additionally, as campaigns evolve from one-and-done interactions to a series of smaller interactions throughout the customer life cycle, agencies have to be more iterative with campaign data.
Worboys described one global cosmetic brand that needed to improve online-to-offline engagement with cosmetics shoppers. Using the IMPACT 360 tool coupled with Provenir’s cloud infrastructure (Provenir basically allows companies to ingest cross-channel data into relational databases for subsequent analysis), KBM was able to pull together large, disparate datasets to help the brand better target shoppers across the customer lifecycle.
The agency linked mobile searches for the perfume with branded app downloads. It also connected the app to its Facebook site and enabled appointment booking, via Facebook messaging, at local stores.
“SMS and email messaging are used to remind the customer of the special appointment, and upon arrival in the store, a notification is pushed to the shopper’s phone, via the app, with a special offer for various selected products,” Worboys explained. “This discount offer, plus the [in-store service] provided … for a follow-up communication two weeks later with a tailored suggestion for the next product the shopper should buy.”
