Advertisement Tech — Products and Solutions
AdTech products serve a variety of purposes right from providing technology and the framework for seamless advertisement placement to laying out software solution blankets to carry out the whole operation efficiently and effectively. It also diversifies into creatives of producing marketing content and strategic ads placements. With user privacy taking the pedestal, all the above should also conform to mutating regulations.
Let’s dig into the details of each product one by one. Let’s borrow Carl, a fictional character from the previous post for the user reference. Say Hello to Carl.
1. Data Onboarding:
Data onboarding is the process of transferring offline data to an online environment for marketing needs. Data onboarding is mainly used to connect offline customer records with online users by matching Personally Identifiable Information (PII) gathered from offline datasets to find the same customers online.
Offline data: Offline data, of course, originates from offline sources. This ranges from in-store purchases to loyalty card data and more.
Online data: Online data captures the behaviors, interests, and interactions of consumers that are exhibited across the internet, as gathered by cookies.
PII: Personally Identifiable Information, such as name, street address, telephone number, and more.
Carl enters into a supermarket, let’s call it Call-Mart, to buy some furniture. He bought a sofa set and registered his email while checking out. Now, chances are that he’d soon be looking for a center-table to go with the sofa-set. Call-Mart doesn’t want Carl to spend his fortunes elsewhere. So, how does the supermarket target him online? This is where linking the offline data to online identifiers becomes imperative. Let’s see in brief how the magic happens.
The PII gathered from offline datasets is matched with their online identifiers, say cookies. This can be done in the following two ways:
Deterministic: With the help of telco (telecommunication providers) your phone number(offline data here) can be linked with your mobile ID. This mobile ID (AD id) can be directly used for targeting through the installed apps.
Probabilistic: There are many ways to link offline to online IDs when there’s a room for slight uncertainty. Machine learning models are the way to go about it that probabilistcally determine these linkages. We’ll read more on this in the next blog post.
2. Cross-device tracking:
Cross-device tracking refers to a technology that enables the tracking of users across multiple devices such as smartphones, television sets, smart TVs, and personal computers. Extending the audience by linking online identifiers, say Carl’s browser cookie on his laptop to his mobile ID, that can be used for re-targeting to keep the users engaged on multiple devices. ‘Ingestion and Aggregation’ is the valid category here. The process of linking again is deterministically or through probabilistic measures.
Deterministic: Deterministic cross-device tracking is when publishers and platforms ask their users to sign in to their websites and apps on every device they use. This allows digital media properties to track their users across devices accurately because the login credentials stay the same.
Probabilistic: This is where matters get interesting and there are still many unexploited techniques through which it can be made more accurate. Finding patterns in data usage considering attributes like IP address, location, device type, etc, can narrow down our search for IDs link to small clusters. More would be discussed on this in the next post.
3. User profiling:
Aggregating information from various sources to give a full 360 view on a user. Adding profile information like demographics and psychometric attributes to unique identifiers.
4. Customer Data Platform:
Customer Data Platforms build customer profiles by integrating data from a variety of first-, second-, and third-party sources. This includes your CRM and DMP, transactional systems, web forms, email and social media activity, website and e-commerce behavioral data, and more.
CDPs build customer profiles in a way that helps your organization get acquainted with every individual. The software can help inform customer behavioral analysis and construct identity graphs. The analysis serves multiple purposes, right from making decisions on choosing the right marketing channel for a customer to offline targeting modes.
As we know that Carl is looking for a center-table for his living room and we have an online identifier to target a Call-Mart ad to nudge him towards maintaining his loyalty towards the said supermarket. Say, we have additional information on Carl that he loves to listen to music on Spotify late in the evenings post-work. Wouldn’t the chances of conversion be higher if Call-Mart displayed an ad then making the most of his elated state?
5. Print to digital translation:
As traditional print publishers have increasingly moved towards web and mobile platforms, they’ve looked for ways to bring their print ads with them. The solution takes ads designed for print publications and turns them into rich media ads. That is ads specifically designed to take advantage of the functionality of web pages and, especially, tablets and smartphones. The service is valuable because it slashes cost and time of print-to-digital translation and allows publishers to sell ads across both print and mobile platforms in a single transaction, instead of through separate deals for each media.
6. Data warehousing and standardization:
A platform for automated data pre-processing, ingestion on a defined taxonomy, and generating standard statistics for consumption for every fresh batch of data. Apart from various engineering architectural designs, a fair amount of focus is also provided to data quality measures like flagging fraud data and deciphering quality in terms of scores at a user-level.
7. Search Engine Optimization and Content Optimization tools:
Almost 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine and 70% of the links that people click are organic.
It is of utmost importance to boost the popularity of your website and your brand to mark a presence in the online world and also to sell your ‘ad space’ as an inventory. When it comes to inbound marketing, no other technique can deliver the same results.
8. Conversational Marketing — Chatbots, Voice Assistants, Contact Center Automation:
Deploying intelligent voice assistants to improve marketing, sales, and customer service. Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered digital assistants engage with customers using natural language processing models where customers can self-select through common questions and issues. If something is too complex or needs a human touch, it’s passed to a live agent. The agent receives all context and details gained in the automated chat.
Voice bots also open up revenue growth opportunities through cross-selling and up-selling. They can make personalized recommendations based on customer history and preferences. Plus, the speed, accuracy, and 24-hour availability of voice bots directly affect the customer experience.
9. Marketing Performance Management:
Marketing performance management is the organizational capacity for improving the ROI and effectiveness of marketing. It encompasses the planning process, performance measurement, and the establishment of predictive analytics. To implement a strong marketing performance management function marketing teams must:
1) Align marketing teams to revenue goals and corporate goals
2) Establish accountability and measurability for revenue goals
3) Implement predictive capabilities for revenue
10. Customer Intelligence Platform:
Like the CDP, the CIP (Customer Intelligence Platform) can manage vast amounts of customer data from a range of different sources, aggregating it all to provide marketers with a more comprehensive view of each customer. The CIP also includes enhancements that enable the integration of e-commerce as well as sales data for machine learning algorithms to digest for more powerful, actionable insights. With a CIP, marketers can coordinate messaging across channels and devices to reach their most engaged customers with personalized interactions. CIPs also enable omnichannel attribution, so marketers can identify their most effective channels and adjust their strategy accordingly. This is a unified view of all the steps of the lifecycle.
Let’s revive Carl from death and unleash the power of CIP on him. Carl seems like a social person and has apps like Facebook, Twitter, Messenger installed on his phone. It seems like Instagram would love to have this user onboarded.
How do we make that happen? Yes, through our ‘Intelligent’ platform by running recommendation models. The algorithm would be able to tell this by analyzing other users’ installation behavior.
Now, Carl is delighted to stumble upon this app, and Instagram has added a valuable user in its kitty. And everyone involved in the process made monies! :D
We’ll talk more about Machine Learning and how it can make a world of difference to advertisers and publishers in the next post.
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