One of the most important steps to launching programmatic advertising is ensuring access to comprehensive, accurate and accessible real-time data. After all, when it comes to data marketing, it’s garbage in, garbage out.
As programmatic advertising and other types of real-time marketing become more widespread, having 24/7 access to accurate real-time data is going from a nice-to-have to a must-have for global CMOs.
Even the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which has been pushing the ad tech industry for greater accountability on behalf of global brands, estimates its members spent 28 percent of their digital media budgets on programmatic advertising in 2018. That was up from 17 percent in 2017 and 9.5 percent in 2014, according to WFA membership surveys.
Real-time marketing allows brands to serve the right content to the right person on the right device at the right time to help close the sale or move the consumer further down the sales funnel. This is made possible by real-time analytics and ad server technology that enables brands to respond in milliseconds to signals consumers send during their omnichannel journey.
Concerns about transparency and GDPR notwithstanding, brands are reporting tremendous lifts in traffic, open and conversion rates from programmatic campaigns.
Office Depot was able to increase revenue $6.9 million in four months by personalizing content on its product detail pages, according to personalization software maker Monetate. A luxury travel site was able to increase email sign-ups and catalog requests 8 and 3.6 percent respectively by using Monetate to personalize content for visitors to its web site.
In the United Kingdom, the wireless carrier O2 used usage, device and location data from customer’s mobile devices to show them the trade-in value of their devices, the best upgrade deals available and what customers like them generally preferred upgrading to, reports GlobalWebIndex.com. The result: a 128 percent lift in click-through rates.
The next wave
Real-time marketing continues to evolve right alongside human behavior, which has shown an amazing ability to adopt new technology. Less than five years after Amazon introduced Alexa and began shipping the Echo, more than 66 million smart speakers have been in installed in the United States, including 30 million installed in 2018. To get a sense of the dizzying pace of adoption, check out Voicebot.ai’s Voice Assistant Timeline.
Given predictions that half of all searches will be voice searches by 2020 and that only 8 of every 100 will request audible-only search results, this has huge ramifications for programmatic advertisers. Imagine, for instance, that you have an opportunity to serve the lone audible search result to a consumer who has commanded Alexa to read me the results of their voice search for the most fuel-efficient 2019 SUV model. How valuable would that be to your business?
One study estimates American consumers purchased $1.8 billion in goods via voice commerce in 2017 and forecasted that number to grow 20 fold by 2022.
Nearly one in four (37 percent) new smart speaker owners surveyed for The Smart Audio Report in July 2018 Research said they used it for pre-purchase research.
This begs the question of how many product sellers are actually ready to serve up information in response to voice queries about their product or category, Voicebot.ai Editor and Publisher Bret Kinsella wrote at the time. The answer is very few.
Garbage in, garbage out
While it will take years to sort out the ideal formats, pricing and attribution models for read me voice search ads, forward-thinking advertisers, agencies, publishers and Ad Tech companies are already using the BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) to tap voice search and other real-time data signals to improve their real-time targeting. Thanks to nearly 100 partners, the BDEX DXP contains nearly 1 trillion data points on tens of millions of U.S. consumers. More importantly for programmatic advertising, the BDEX ID Graph uses 100 percent deterministic matching.
This last point is critical because we believe the biggest challenge facing CMOs today is the poor quality of most marketing data. We spent the last five years building a data infrastructure to provide the data brands and retailers need to know and serve their customers better. Today nearly 100 partners contribute data to our DXP.
At BDEX we call this building the data infrastructure that powers human connectivity, and we are convinced it will foster the highly personalized and inobtrusive brand experiences consumers want.
Surveys like Deloitte’s 2018 Ad Blocking Report, show that the Ad Tech industry has so far fallen far short of delivering that experience.
BDEX is committed to building the infrastructure that powers human connectivity. Thanks to more than 100 partners, our the BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) marketers can choose data from over 5,500 categories, including shopping, sports, health, recreation, and science. We have over 900 billion data points on U.S. consumers, with half coming from industry-leading sources like Acxiom and Neustar and half coming from real-time custom tags. Why not call BDEX today to see how we can help you launch or improve your real-time marketing.
