At Advertising Week 2019, the Spotlight is on AdTech

I recent­ly attend­ed Adver­tis­ing Week Europe, where I joined experts from all sides of the adver­tis­ing land­scape to dis­cuss the busi­ness trends and issues that are shap­ing today’s indus­try. I was asked to talk about how AdTech fits into the over­all MarTech pic­ture, based on my expe­ri­ence help­ing hun­dreds of clients in the EMEA region use tech­nol­o­gy to bring more strat­e­gy to their paid media spend.

The media land­scape has nev­er been more frag­ment­ed, and tech­nol­o­gy has nev­er been more impor­tant in help­ing adver­tis­ers main­tain a clear pic­ture of the audi­ences they are try­ing to reach. In recent years, there has been an explo­sion of dif­fer­ent screens and for­mats, with audi­ences con­stant­ly mov­ing back­wards and for­wards from Face­book on their tablet, to video-on-demand on their smart TV.

The fun­nel no longer resem­bles the sim­ple aware­ness-to-pur­chase path­way I knew when I began my mar­ket­ing career. Con­sumers are fol­low­ing the media equiv­a­lent of a “Choose Your Own Adven­ture” nov­el, and it is increas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to ensure that this jour­ney fol­lows a con­sis­tent and coher­ent nar­ra­tive. The sit­u­a­tion is fur­ther com­pli­cat­ed by inter­nal silos, where var­i­ous depart­ments are fail­ing to share infor­ma­tion and coor­di­nate their efforts.

How­ev­er, brands realise how impor­tant con­sis­tent Cus­tomer Expe­ri­ence (CX) is to build­ing cus­tomer loy­al­ty and dri­ving sales. Accord­ing to the recent Dig­i­tal Trends sur­vey con­duct­ed by Adobe, brands that offer com­pelling CX will typ­i­cal­ly boast bet­ter brand aware­ness, high­er return on adver­tis­ing spend, greater cus­tomer reten­tion and high­er growth rates. And yet the indus­try clear­ly has a way to go, with the same sur­vey show­ing that 87% of cus­tomers believe brands need to put more effort into pro­vid­ing a seam­less cus­tomer experience.

The good news is that a uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ence becomes a lot eas­i­er to deliv­er once brands are able to inte­grate their over­all mar­ket­ing tech­nol­o­gy back­bone. As part of the Dig­i­tal Trends sur­vey, we looked at the lead­ers in CX and the qual­i­ties that set them apart from their peers. The results were telling: 32% of CX lead­ers have a high­ly inte­grat­ed cloud-based tech­nol­o­gy stack com­pared to 7% of their low­er-per­form­ing peers.

Using tech­nol­o­gy to con­nect adver­tis­ing man­age­ment with over­all mar­ket­ing and busi­ness man­age­ment has sev­er­al ben­e­fits. Uni­fied tech­nol­o­gy helps brands syn­chro­nise their efforts in audi­ence man­age­ment, media buy­ing, mea­sure­ment, ana­lyt­ics, and cre­ative. This helps keep mes­sag­ing con­sis­tent and rel­e­vant across the entire cus­tomer jour­ney, no mat­ter how frag­ment­ed it may be. It also helps each aspect ben­e­fit from insights gath­ered at oth­er points along the chain. Expe­ri­ence has shown that Adobe cus­tomers who join their Ana­lyt­ics to their Ad Cloud plat­forms typ­i­cal­ly expe­ri­ence a 14–18% lift in ROI on their adver­tis­ing spend.

It has nev­er been more impor­tant to pro­vide a uni­fied cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. The world’s lead­ing brands are look­ing to tech­nol­o­gy to bring togeth­er the var­i­ous dis­parate ele­ments of their mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties, and AdTech remains a cru­cial part of any effort to ful­ly under­stand and man­age the cus­tomer jour­ney. At Adver­tis­ing Week I was asked how AdTech fits into the big­ger pic­ture and – as I con­clud­ed in my pre­sen­ta­tion – the answer is quite sim­ple: it needs to fit tight­ly and neat­ly with­in a brand’s over­all MarTech stack.

You can view my full pre­sen­ta­tion from Adver­tis­ing Week on Slideshare.