Data-Driven Thinking

Brands are feeling the pressure to cut costs as the global economy remains uncertain. Some are even appealing to agencies to extend payment terms to get a handle on their finances. But it’s time for payment terms to be pruned to reasonable lengths to restore brand-agency relations and ensure supply chains don’t become overburdened with debts, writes Hasan Arik, Founder and CPO, Redmill Solutions.

Back in 2018, Tim Cook said, “The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer—if our customer was our product.” Fast-forward to 2022, and, to deliver the most relevant Apple Search Ads, the company uses “information a customer includes in their Apple ID account” for ad targeting purposes. If that isn’t monetizing your customers, what is, writes Uriah Av-Ron, partner and founder at Oasis Public Relations.

SKAdNetwork (SKAN) 4.0 was released last month and there’s a lot to be optimistic about. But there’s also complexity to unpack. While Apple has focused on bringing more measurement into their framework, it could further fragment the advertising ecosystem, too. Katie Madding, chief product officer at Adjust, offers five key changes to be aware of.

Following Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the heads of privacy, security and compliance all abruptly left the company. The legal department is scrambling to pick up the pieces, asking engineers to “self-certify compliance.” The door is open for massive privacy breaches, writes Vuk Janosevic, co-founder and CEO of Blindnet.

Why is it considered a brand safety issue for advertisers to buy against news content when it’s clearly not an issue for national brands to advertise against violent, albeit fictional, content elsewhere, including on CTV?

Reminders of our own mortality trigger dramatic behavioral change. Terror management theory dictates that any death reminder will initiate a spectrum of behaviors designed to protect and uplift our sense of self. And these adaptations include changes in purchasing behavior, too, writes Swaroop Reddy, CIO at Omnicom Precision Marketing Group.

The digitization of advertising unleashed a torrent of easily measurable statistics for marketers to measure performance. These KPIs have their place in marketing strategy. But digital marketing has become too focused on proxy KPIs in lieu of the metric that matters most: revenue, writes Michael Morris, co-founder of Hyperlocology.

Only about half of marketers are utilizing the full breadth of capabilities of their marketing tech stack. But, writes Katie Klumper, CEO and founder of Black Glass, what if we treated technology like a team member?

What will data look like in a privacy-first world? Marketers will need to scale their data usage based on contextual privacy sensitivity and specific use cases. This sliding scale will consist of three classifications of data: features, services and adjacent data sources, writes Femi Taiwo, head of consultancy, Europe, at Assembly Global.

Performance marketing is a CFO’s dream – it drives measurable growth for every dollar spent. That’s why it’s absolutely essential in an unstable economic climate, writes Sean Popen, EVP at Matterkind.