“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Privacy regulations, ecosystem changes and the increasing fragmentation of consumer attention leave many marketers wondering how to best enable holistic measurement. Marketers will soon be unable to rely on third-party data to understand customers at scale, and the jury is still out on how first-party data can power measurement.
Should marketers invest the immense amount of time and resources required to build media channel and marketing platform connections on their own? Or should they look to existing vendors for enablement? Or should they approach analytics and measurement with a hybrid model, building out privacy-safe extensions of their data into platforms that can provide a broader view of touch points to evaluate ROI?
One of the most important questions marketers can assess is whether measurement vendors have built out the partnership ecosystem necessary to support a cross-silo view. Most importantly, they need to determine how to tap into granular, meaningful and privacy-safe data to inform measurement and maximize actionable insights.
So what is certain? No matter where you sit in the ecosystem – buy or sell side, enablement or measurement – it will be impossible to have a full view of marketing without partnerships. In an ID-free world, there are three ways partnerships can help marketers achieve holistic measurement to drive business outcomes and ROI: enhanced data, expedited insights and enablement of scale.
Enhanced, accurate data
Whether the starting point is first-party data or aggregated channel performance, marketers need to develop insights from an ecosystem of increasingly siloed data. This can only be done by partnering with other organizations to enhance known data, providing broader, deeper context to limited information on customers and marketing efforts.
With partnerships, marketers can access a diverse array of contextual data on competitors, weather, the economy and location. And with a more robust data set at their disposal, they can assess campaign effectiveness across and within channels, compare performance to that of rivals and evaluate impact based on local market factors. More granular data can also show the devices consumers use and reveal other precise metrics that can then shape marketing activity.
But there’s a caveat. As data volume grows, data integrity and careful curation are essential. A focus on sourcing high-quality, non-PII inputs are also paramount. As the adage goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” An organization can have the best algorithms, but if the data going into the models is incomplete, inconsistent or stale, the margin of error for insights goes up and the difference could cost millions of dollars.
Expedited insights
Second only to data integrity is the need for speed. There is a big difference between a data delivery cadence supporting post-campaign ROI measurement and a deeper integration that enables insights for in-flight optimization.
ID-based models use an increasingly unavailable sample of customers that cannot be deduplicated against a complex maze of walled gardens. These tactical touch points are then extrapolated, modeling for the gaps, and used to inform much broader marketing strategy. This oftentimes leads marketers to employ strategies out of context.
However, when user data is aggregated but offered at a greater cadence and with more granularity, it is possible to arrive at a broader, more informed position while respecting consumers’ desire not to be tracked individually.
The catch is that integrations with an ever-evolving set of data providers take time. These relationships and access points need to be well-managed. Only those with a deep portfolio of partnerships can provide the necessary coverage and interoperability for omnichannel marketing measurement.
Enablement of scale
With enhanced data via partnerships and expedited, actionable insights, marketers can explore and deploy new strategies. For example, experimentation at a market level can be evaluated and scaled, oftentimes for less time and investment than costly identity resolution processes.
Working with partners to enable a clear path from evaluation to application can provide invaluable guidance to analytics, media, product marketing, sales, finance and operations teams. It’s a shift of investment from hypotheses based on smaller tactical analysis to real-world testing of strategies that can be quickly scaled.
Enhanced, omnichannel and expedited data and insights that enable scale are the future-proof solution to help marketers adapt, evolve and thrive.
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