One of our crack analysts ran into an IBM Global Business Services report recently, “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.” I won’t bore you with a complete recap of the 20-pager, but it does have some great insights about consumer-centric marketing that are worth noodling over.
The report’s basic premise: as consumers gain more control over their media experience and advertisers shift to more measurable digital formats, we must move beyond traditional advertising by improving both the granularity of targeting and cross-platform integration. What’s that mean? It means we’ve got a long way to go.
If it were easy, we’d already be there. It’s not. What’s in the way? The report argues that one hurdle is the slow migration from traditional platforms that align with either transaction or brand objectives to “brands-actional” advertising that simultaneously addresses both objectives using new digital formats (social media, online video, mobile, gaming, branded entertainment, advanced TV, etc.).
The ultimate consumer-centric advertising is targeted, measurable, interactive, integrated and contextual. To get there, says the report, will require these essential capabilities:
- Creative must move from a media-centric development model to cross-platform innovation.
- Analytics must move from anonymous household-level measurements by media platform to more insightful individual and contextual targeting supported by integrated dashboards and action-based measurements.
- Continue to develop new forms of collaboration and partnering throughout the industry value chain.
- Develop new efficiencies, including end-to-end digital workflow automation and standards in processes, formats and metrics.
At T3, we’ve been addressing these issues for years by breaking down internal silos, leveraging our data to produce meaningful insights, embracing new technology to automate workflow and driving integrated campaigns that simultaneously lift ROI and brands. The road can be bumpy, but it’s clearly the way forward to advertising that is more targeted and measurable than ever.
- In the meantime, there are key questions to ponder:
- How do we convince marketers to embrace experimentation in the current economic environment?
- How do we best diversify revenues and secure strategic relationships with clients?
- How should organizations be restructured to deliver more integrated, consumer-centric, cross-platform campaigns?
- How do we develop an infrastructure that can deliver scalable integration and insights to the industry?
