This December, Sequent Partners will say farewell to the advertising and media industries.
After 21 years of devising innovative ways to improve the effectiveness of advertising investments, we’ve decided it’s time. Freedom and the open road beckon. We will be retiring from media consulting. And while we will continue to provide assistance to the industry as needed, Sequent Partners will be ceasing operations.
When we started our careers, it was a mass marketing world. National brands, national advertising, national media, national sales. Broadly defined demo-based targets, no niches anywhere in sight.
We’re leaving behind a far more promising 1:1 marketing era. Tailored products, targeted media, relevant personalized messages with outcome measurement right alongside.
We’ve gotten closer and closer to that magnificent vision on every marketer’s white board: personalized, just-in-time messaging, targeting true intenders, real-time trackable outcomes – all affordable at scale.
The industry has made epic improvements and grown exponentially in our lifetimes. Massive tech and data investments have connected many of the pieces of the most complex media ecosystem on the planet. That is a huge accomplishment.
And yet, our media world is still a bit of an agile engineering “MVP” – a minimum viable product. Digital media has just enough features to be usable, but it’s far from a well-oiled machine.
Why is that, and how do we go about fixing it?
Recenter the consumer
How did we lose sight of the consumer? In a tech-centric world, a focus on data understandably obscures the person represented by that data. A multidimensional image of the consumer is not baked into the system.
We’ve forgotten that positive consumer sentiment toward a brand improves the effectiveness of the brand’s upper- and lower-funnel messages. And we’re missing the impact creative has on consumer preference, too. Resonance, relevance and reactions are not considered in the average media tech solution.
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Refocusing on the consumer will be hard and expensive. The vision requires a scalable, holistic system that accurately captures consumer attitudes and preferences and distributes messages that are targeted to the right person – not their device or household.
But it will also require privacy-safe solutions that are built on accurate, recent and complete data – not just the best available data.
Fix media delivery
From the consumer perspective, media delivery is a mess. They’re dealing with ad collision, excessive frequency and inaccurately targeted spots that are unconnected to content.
Advertisers suffer with unknown reach and frequency. Though some providers offer nascent holistic solutions, for the most part we’re operating in an ecosystem with enormous blind spots, with ad tech dumping impressions on faceless households.
AI tools and platforms attempt to control and streamline the process of media delivery. But AI brings with it another set of issues related to accuracy and transparency.
The type of consumer data that fuels AI platforms will be irrevocably altered by privacy laws and business practice. And when using AI, marketers may be working with synthetic data and personas that are one step too many removed from real consumers with real hearts and minds.
Advertisers and ad tech need to set aside individual interests in favor of industry collaboration, integration and standardization. If we want better results, we need an interoperable, holistic view that can cure ad collisions, solve frequency capping and provide accurate reach.
Optimize outcomes
The industry has also made strong strides in optimizing outcomes, driven by advancements in measurement and machine learning and the plethora of data at our disposal. Still, our modeling methods may never achieve the real-time response needed to drive programmatic buying or provide granular insights into consumer segments and journeys.
Those insights were the promise of attribution. But they’ve been stymied by privacy policies and legislation. Attribution also has a scope problem. Walled gardens have strong attribution within their walls, and clean rooms can integrate disparate data. But we are nowhere near a full understanding of the consumer journey and the real impact of 360-degree communication plans.
Marketers face a serious fork in the road. We will either have complete and accurate consumer-level data, or privacy policies and legislation will make that impossible.
Given that uncertainty, should we go all in on first-party data, anonymized data sets and privacy-preserving measurement technologies? Or should we abandon the notion of individual data entirely and adopt cohort-based measurement? An argument could be made for either path.
Today’s generation of professionals has the creativity, brainpower and capabilities to usher in a new, more holistic approach to marketing that centers on the real people behind the ad impressions.
As we leave this industry behind, we hope marketers will carry this minimum viable product as far as it can go and not stop short of creating the ecosystem consumers desperately deserve.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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