• by Anto Chittilappilly , Op-Ed Contributor, May 28, 2013

In a figurative battle of tug of war, today’s most innovative and quickly evolving marketing platforms continue to enable marketers with new capabilities, while at the same time challenging marketers’ ability to accurately and effectively capture and quantify their performance.

Data Volume

As mobile advertising hits $6.7 billion, U.S. television households hit an all-time high of 115 million, and innovative techniques in mobile and social channels continue to evolve, both new and traditional technology platforms scramble to map their tracking and measurement capabilities to the needs of this marketplace. Of particular interest is TV viewership, which is still providing the largest media reach of any channel used in the U.S. and is quickly evolving as a trackable advertising medium as cable providers collect and monetize set-top box data for marketing purposes. This not only provides marketers and their analytics solution of choice with a goldmine of user-level media consumption data (a veritable proxy for cookie data), but also poses the significant challenge of deriving audience and media insights using Big Data and cloud technologies and translating those insights into marketing optimization strategies.

In addition, online video streaming is exploding and is gaining significant velocity each quarter as the adoption of higher bandwidth devices and services increases. ABC/Disney, Amazon, Apple, Google, Hulu, Netflix and Roku all offer online video streaming, with many more to follow. This  once again challenges marketers and their analytics partners to collect, process, analyze and  draw insights with the goal not only to optimize the performance of addressable TV and/or video streaming marketing, but to optimize it in concert with all the other channels, campaigns and tactics that are concurrently in market.

Tracking

Created by technology providers like Microsoft and Mozilla, and proposed by our elected officials on Capitol Hill, the “do not track” issue is the 800-pound gorilla in the marketing mix. Just as a higher percentage of many companies’ media spend was spent on more measureable online channels, and the nation’s (and world’s) economy was stimulated by more efficient marketing and purchasing on the part of consumers, outside influences imposed obstacles to the efficiency and effectiveness of optimization.

Adding a layer of complexity to the tracking challenge, many of the leading analytics platforms are pursuing a way to use data that’s currently made available from devices and service platforms in order to stitch together the engagement stack of touchpoints for a single user across the multiple home/office devices to which a particular consumer is exposed.

Other Opportunities and Challenges

Google is in the process of moving its cookie data to Google Cloud Storage (GCS). Measurement and analytics vendors, whose platforms use this user-level media consumption data, and rely on the existing “plumbing” to gain access to it, will now be challenged to tear out something that has traditionally worked well. 

If tracking is marketing’s 800-pound gorilla, Facebook is definitely its 900-pound beast. With its acquisition of ad-server Atlas, Facebook shared data with marketers and marketing analytics solutions providers.

The Solution: Innovate, Execute & Scale

Today’s consumers are instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. Their behavior rewards marketers who are selective in targeting and who interact with them intelligently. More marketing touchpoints from more channels than ever before are driving the need for innovative measurement tactics, seamless execution and sheer scale.

In order to gain a competitive edge, 21^st century marketers need:    

Innovation: Adopt a marketing technology that accurately measures and enables optimization of a shared set of marketing metrics across ALL channels, campaigns, tactics, business units and products. 

Execution: Leverage marketing execution platforms that use optimization models to determine marketing spend allocation across channels, tactics and audiences.

Scale: Use marketing technology with Big Data handling capabilities to efficiently process volumes and deliver actionable recommendations, as the number of digital touchpoints explodes into trillions of records and petabytes of data.