Ask your media buyer to make more than 500 million decisions every second.
It is estimated that the human brain’s ability to store memories is equivalent to about 2.5 petabytes of binary data (2500 TB).
The human brain consists of about one billion neurons. Each neuron links to 1,000 other neurons, making more than a trillion connections. Neurons combine so that each one increases the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).
If it was a digital video recorder, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows, which, if you left it running non-stop would take more than 300 years to use up.
So that’s all good then. But there’s a different side to the brain that isn’t nearly so impressive. Storage is one thing – but the ability to process different actions (whilst simultaneously assessing their impact and learning what to better next time) is something else again.
Multi-tasking is a myth. The brain actually focuses on the need to perform actions sequentially, one at a time. Biologically, we are simply not equipped to process complex instructions and actions simultaneously.
Just as well then that technology can help us in the increasingly complex work, of making sure that our communications messages are only being placed in the right places to achieve maximum effect and that we can rely on it to learn, analyse and improve its performance every time that it is deployed, at a rate of up to 500 million decisions a second. Try that on Elaine in the media department.
Broadly, this technology comes under the heading of ‘Programmatic Marketing’. It’s a system of integrated technologies which for the sake of simplicity we will call Date Management Platforms (DMP) and Demand Side Platforms (DSP) which work together to optimise every aspect of your media expenditure by ensuring that every penny is spent in the right place, at the right time, for the right audience within an ‘optimisation loop’ that can learn and react accordingly at a rate of 500 million times a second or thereabouts. Not much else happens that fast – although a mosquito flaps its wings at the same rate, which might have added to the ‘blood sucking’ behaviours that you have possibly encountered during your exposure to some media buyers.
A DMP allows you to create target audiences based on a combination of in-depth first-party and third-party audience data and to accurately target campaigns to these audiences across all channels and then measure with accuracy which campaigns performed the best, by segment, time, content and so on, so that the exposure rules can be systematically improved continuously.
In order to do this, the DMP takes sorted data from a number of different points and aims it squarely at the customer, if they’re known, or at cookies if they’re not. This amounts to uploading important information like customer ID or email address, their buying patterns and habits and/or what else they have considered and how loyal they might be, also using the conventional targeting criteria of demographics and any other known criteria. This allows you to load your communication so that it has the best chance of being empathetic to customer wants and needs.
DSP, meanwhile, analyses and orders customer engagement at each stage of the buying journey and feeds that back into the buying (DMP) process. Together, you get real time continuous learning behaviour and improvement that does exactly what you need and what you’ve paid for – a change to consumer preference, to your benefit. The system learns with every interaction, making immediate and accurate choices that improve ROI, automatically.
Data from all channels should be included from ecommerce and CRM systems as well as conventional targeting typologies. The system should be designed to track consumers (some with, some without cookies) across multiple devices. Once input, the data is stored into taxonomies that enable advanced and automatic segmentation and infinite variation and highly personalised, creatively sound prospecting messages depending on what targeting parameters you have set as inputs based on the paradigm.
To summarise, DMPs tie all audience data together in one place and use it to help maximise future media buys and create relevant messaging at the creative stage, thereby getting better customer understanding and appreciation of content.
DSPs are used to buy advertising media based on the information that you have gleaned from the DMP. This is important, because although the DMP is a goldmine-like repository of information, it can’t, on its own, do much about getting the output from that to the customer. Increasingly, the boundaries between DMPs and DSPs are beginning to blur and becoming systematised in order to make every buy count, ever higher ROI and more surety about decisions that rely less on habit or traditional demography and more on actual learning and knowledge. That way, you get a 360 degree view of your customer and prospects, advanced analytics, the ability to find and reach your most valuable and prolific customer groupings and the surety of performance across the entire media schedule. Along the way come other benefits, such as being able to spot trends early, based on customer feedback and behaviours. In fact, DSPs were purposely designed around building display ad campaigns, rather than using less flexible analytics such as Google AdWords.
And much in the way that traditional media buyers work, DSPs allow the management of multiple campaigns via one interface and enable real time bidding for relevant time/space based on the suitability of the data available to their chosen targets. Book the ad, send it, personalise it, track it, optimise, learn, repeat.
And by the way, we’re talking here about both online and offline media and a depth of understanding that goes beyond the initial customer contact strategies, but which can also pull in and model available data sources that often exist within businesses but aren’t used to maximise media expenditure, control media budgets or other communications planning aspects because, up until recently, they just haven’t seemed relevant to that task. The truth is, everything that your business knows, in any department, is relevant to marketing, because the money that is used to run the business and generate profits can only come from one place – the customer.
Before you call up your agency media department and tell them that they have to work 24/7, 365 days a year, without holidays and without sickies – and without being on the payroll – consider that here at LAW, we are early adopters with highly complex digital tools to make our exceptional creative talents as effective as they can be, to make the biggest impact and to stretch ROI as far as possible.
Data management, audience management, multi-channel campaign management, maximum and proven relevance of creative content, programmatic analysis, advanced insights, strategy and reporting are all in our day’s work.
The famous John Wanamaker (1838-1922), a pioneering retailer from Philadelphia once said “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” And people still say that today.
Well, they shouldn’t. Because right now, you can know more than you ever thought possible about the effect that your advertising is having and tune it on a real-time, optimised, continuously improving basis.
It’s simple. All you have to do is to make 500 million decisions a second.
Or talk to us.
Please contact keith.sammels@lawcreative.co.uk
Obsessive Customer Centricity- Amsterdam Style
September 26th 2014
November 11th 2013