When it comes to performance metrics, AIG’s online marketing chief Daniel Loebl isn’t joking around.
“In my work, we don’t have soft metrics,” said Loebl, whose official title is assistant VP of the digital center of excellence at AIG in the US. “I don’t allow them in my spend. Something either gets conversions or not.”
As a multinational insurance corporation – the company was ranked as the 40th largest on the 2014 Fortune 500 list – AIG has certain legislative restrictions and regulatory hoops it has to jump through in order to take advantage of its data, all of which needs to be stripped of personally identifiable information before it’s ready for advertising prime time.
Travel Guard, the travel insurance division of AIG, has been working with digital marketing tech player IgnitionOne – whose other clients include Bridgestone, CenturyLink, Fiat and GM – for the last five years in the US to manage its online marketing budget, run its pay-per-click and display campaigns, measure organic traffic and calculate attribution.
Travel Guard also feeds non-PII first-party data into IgnitionOne’s data-management platform. All in all, AIG takes advantage of the majority of the offerings within IgnitionOne’s Digital Marketing Suite, the most recent iteration of which was released Thursday.
“It gives us more visibility into what my money is doing and helps me with what I’m planning to do, which in turn increases the amount of data I have to put into the DMP,” Loebl said.
The newly souped up version of IgnitionOne’s platform includes cross-device tracking through its DMP, customizable dashboards, attribution visualizations and cross-channel media mix modeling, all of which is available via a single sign-on.
In other words, it has all the characteristics of a marketing cloud without being solely focused on retention, said IgnitionOne’s CEO, Will Margiloff.
“The audience segmentation you get out of the DMP is fully integrated with the other channels, and those types of things are done in combination with dashboard enhanced features like attribution reporting and mixed media modeling added together with the previously available features,” Margiloff said, “Marketing clouds are very CRM focused, but marketing is much greater than that and the automation of marketing is greater than that.”
Travel Guard is planning to take advantage of the new features, all of which are now out of beta. Loebl told AdExchanger that he’s particularly looking forward to the ability to automate his reporting and his dashboards, which he uses to track post-click activity and do predictive modeling.
“Data management was always automated, but data reporting still required human intervention,” Loebl said.
Loebl is admittedly performance obsessed.
“If a network doesn’t deliver on our KPIs, it’s dropped,” he said. “Those are the rules of my world.”
Travel Guard runs predictive scenarios through IgnitionOne. The various ad networks vying for AIG’s business – say AOL, Sojern or Adara, for example – then have to prove their worth by meeting the company’s specific demands.
“I tell both the network and IgnitionOne what I want, like more click-throughs or more conversions, and if the network can deliver that as measured by what [IgnitionOne’s] hub shows, then we’re good,” Loebl said. “If they don’t deliver on that, they’re dropped. They have about 10 working days to show us what they can do.”
But there’s no rest for the wicked – or for the performance marketer.
“We don’t refer to what we do as individual campaigns [because] we’re always changing things up and testing,” Loebl said. “We have campaigns running 365 days a year. If I put out a new banner, we measure it for effectiveness, and if the metrics in the hub don’t add up, we drop the banner and put up another one until we find the one that works – and then we try to beat it.”
