Actual Shopper Data is the Answer to a Sea of Third Party Sameness
In case you haven’t heard, intelligent third-party data can cure a common cold, get your kids to eat veggies, and help you lose weight without diet and exercise. Like most too good to be true promises, third-party data is also a pipedream. By relinquishing much of their digital marketing efforts to inferred data based on user profiles and activities, many marketers have diminished their brands by simply spamming consumers to the point that most have deployed active countermeasures to avoid their ads. Need proof, look no further than the timed skip button. If your content is useful and more importantly relevant, you shouldn’t have to force a person to endure a few seconds of it while hovering over it to see the content they wanted in the first place. (This gem of wisdom came from some of the smart marketers at last week’s Brand Innovators conference at Southwest Airlines).
Digital advertising saturation is due in large part to a lack of quality inventory. Too many irrelevant ads are chasing too little real attention. As a result, fraud (conservatively 1/3 of all digital ad spend), spam and outright badgering is driving not only wasteful ad spend but also damaging brand equity. Working from a non-proprietary dataset, even the best targeting ‘AI’ essentially becomes the same clunky data, unable to provide unique insights. Efficiencies in targeting quickly deliver diminishing returns as various systems compete to deliver messaging across a variety of digital platforms. Not only is this competition for attention annoying to consumers, but it’s also making many publishing sites unreadable as various engines fight to deliver the perfect ad. The challenge for brands is this… in the race to monetize attention, media and social platforms are rendering much of the host content unreadable.
IRI
One of the most significant remaining challenges is linking a single view of real-world and online shopper behavior. Without a common view, digital marketing often misses the opportunity to engage, inform, or merely connect, opting instead to convert any sign of a shopper interaction. Using real shopper data in concert with digital media offers a true insight into the total impact on the shopper’s path-to-purchase.
New approaches that go beyond inference, but also look at what is happening with shoppers both online and off, are needed to emerge from the current state of ad saturation. IRI’s Liquid Data™ offers a unique view of shopper behavior, blending both the real world, and online, into a single platform. By integrating the data of actual purchasers and likely actions, marketers can substantially increase sales lift in offline channels while lowering the amount of inefficient messaging (spam) to shoppers that aren’t actually in the market for a particular product or service. Purchase based audiences give a valuable tool to marketers that extend datasets beyond inference alone.
For example, recent purchasers of a hair care product can be spared additional messaging until their usual replenishment period is coming to its end. The result is a much better outcome for brand and shopper alike. With deterministic data from over 350MM shopper loyalty cards, IRI has the breadth of data footprint to see a complete view how shoppers behave across multiple offline channels and respond to online marketing. When integrated with online shopper data, an accurate omnichannel view is now possible that will vastly improve the results of marketing spend across all channels. Specific content to engage shoppers at actual points of interest along their paths can be created and employed with much higher efficiency. Campaign results can be compared, in progress, with actual shopper results, and optimized for maximum return.
Actual shopper data bridges the divide between assuming the right time and place for messaging and knowing. Want to know more about how IRI’s shopper data can help optimize digital media spend? There’s some helpful info here.
This story was created in partnership with IRI. I was compensated for my participation but my opinions are my own.
