The ongoing challenges of data

On stage and off, media buyers and brand marketers said digital platforms’ changing data capabilities are giving mixed signals — and mixed results. To navigate weaker signals, Marvel and its agency, Direct Agents, have been leaning more on second-party data and first-party data from parent company Disney to find new ways of reaching consumers.

Speaking on stage on Tuesday, Jessica Malloy, vp of marketing at Marvel Entertainment, said Marvel’s marketing team works with Direct Agents to conduct one experiment at a time while letting other campaigns across various platforms run as efficiently as possible. This requires becoming more comfortable with waiting longer to see how things pan out. But Malloy and Corey Levine, Direct Agents’ vp of integrated media, said their biggest concern is a lack of transparency across the major social media platforms.

“If we don’t understand how it works and they don’t understand how it works,” Malloy said. “And half the time we talk to people at these companies that don’t actually know how it works either. They’re pulling on their menu of ‘try this or try that.’ They’re not privy to the developer’s secret sauce either, and from my perspective, that’s very frustrating.”

As platforms’ changes cause match rates to dwindle, Levine said companies are focusing less on pixel data as the end-all-be-all and instead taking a more holistic view of customer acquisition costs when deciding whether a campaign was successful. He added that increased use of interest-based targeting with keywords on Pinterest and Twitter has also been successful.

“When you’re working with machine learning and AI, we’re often finding brands and agencies are using yesterday’s rules for today’s success,” Levine said. “We are no longer living in a manual bidding strategy where you can wake up and change a bid or a cost capper or something every single day.”

Some media buyers said clients sometimes aren’t even willing to share their business goals, which makes it harder to plan campaigns. There’s also still a disconnect between companies’ business goals and advertising expectations, which leads to inefficient marketing. This is something that analysts are also seeing. According to a new survey conducted by Gartner, 62% of respondents said sales and marketing teams define viable leads differently. The research firm, which releases the findings this week, siad the differences often lead to “inefficient and ineffective customer engagement.”

Measurement concerns still need to be solved by aligning on universal standards, according to Melissa Wisehart, svp of Media Monks, who also spoke with Digiday on stage on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the worst …read more

Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron