MarTech Landscape Simplified

Agencies and brands have never before had to grapple with an environment of such rapidly changing landscape of consumer behaviors, vast technology developments and peer competitions. The continuous change will underpin marketing and advertising landscape for some time to come which means staying up to date with the advancements in the technology ecosystem is the need of the hour. The current trends of digital transformation are all about brand experience and to become an experience driven business, a brand need to provide a truly integrated journey across all three — owned, earned and paid channels. The humongous amount of data available from the marketing and advertising efforts, is enabling the brands to acquire new customers and to retain their loyalty through personalized customer experience and contextual engagement.

The division between AdTech and MarTech were not just technical but were cultural and structural, keeping in mind their siloed functions in the past.

The level of customer experience across every touch point can only be achieved when AdTech, MarTech and DataTech work synchronously together, not in siloes to bridge the divide and deliver exceptional customer experience. Businesses believed that MarTech is controlled by the brand side and AdTech is outsourced to agencies and DataTech is creating a separate stream with its rebellious instincts. In last 20 years these ecosystems have grown in complexity and capability. However, these silo mindsets are changing fast and to win the market, three need to work together.

AdTech was seen till recently as a subset of the overall MarTech (Marketing technology) stack, the reality is the two streams remain very distinct across a number of dimensions. On the other hand, marketing technology (MarTech) was claimed and controlled by brands based on personally identifiable information and until recently was mostly concerned with owned and earned media. AdTech was managed and owned by the agencies, relied on cookies for identification and cornered itself majorly with paid campaigns for search and display advertising. But couple of important trends in the last decade have brought these two disciplines together. For example, social media platforms like Facebook blurred the demarcation between paid, earned and owned channels as the social media team on the brand side took more direct control over the placement of paid campaigns. But the real reason for this merger is the need for brands to build great customer experience through content, context and engagement. And to achieve this, businesses will require a complete view of every customer touch point. This is supported by the single source of truth — their data.

By understanding and marrying the data from the platforms that serve their paid advertising to the platforms that hold their most important customer data and content, new-age marketers are far better equipped to deliver on their goals. Apart from providing personalized and effective messaging, this also helps the marketers move close to solving one of the great challenges of marketing in the digital age which is ‘attribution’. I am focusing on MarTech as it powers all of the other owned and operated channels that a brand has to reach and engage with the audience, including the website, mobile app, email, CRM and social media profiles. Let us discuss major elements that are part of the MarTech ecosystem:

- Data and Analytics (Web, Mobile & others)

- (DMP) Data Management Platform

- CMS (Content Management System)

- Content Syndication

- CX (Customer Experience)

- CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

- Data Visualization Platform

- DAM (Digital Asset Management)

- Ecommerce Platform

- Email platform

- Marketing Automation

- MRM (Marketing Resource Management)

- Personalization Engine

- PII (Personally Identifiable Information)

- Predictive Analytics

- Social Listening

- Social Media Platforms and their Network Effects

- SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

- Tag Management System

- UX (User Experience)

Let us start with data: There are three types of data available to marketers in the converged place.

First Party Data:

This is the information collected from a business and its various activities for that business by the same business. This commonly refers to details about audiences or customers. It also covers performance of marketing strategies and advertising campaigns, including CRM, website, mobile app, customer feedback, ecommerce platform, etc. This data is owned by the brand that controls over how it is collected, processed and used. The collected information in this category is unique to that business and generally considered as the most accurate type of data.

Second Party Data:

This is simply somebody else’s First Party Data. It is procured through a direct transaction and is the result of a reciprocal partnership, not necessarily at regular intervals. It enables a data exchange that benefits both the parties and includes a pre-determined and defined agreement. A reference use case could be an online ticket booking platform (eg. MakeMyTrip.com) and a radio taxi service provider (eg. Ola Cabs or Uber) sharing information to target audiences with relevant offers.

Third Party Data:

This information is compiled from a variety of sources by an unrelated source that remains anonymous and labelled as off the self-segment. This category data provider might have relationships with multiple publishers and companies to build scalable audience. This can be purchased and plugged I to either data management platforms (DMP) or demand side platforms (DSP) for use in targeting ads and marketing brand messages.

Data Management Platform (DMP):

A data management platform is a central system that houses and manages both audience and campaign data. For marketers it can provide a single source of truth that informs both MarTech and AdTech platforms and a unified view of their audience. A good data management platform will enable the creation of customer audience segments and facilitate a look-a-like modelling, where users with similar attributes are grouped together to increase the scale of a segment. These can be used to target relevant advertising creative to specific audiences or to customize an offer on the website or landing page. This is one of the few components in the MarTech stack that truly bridges both marketing and advertising functions.

(We will cover the remaining next week.)