Instead of writing the typical January “how did I do with my predictions” post, I’ve waited until we’re back in the here and now. Looking ahead, within the context of the progress we’ve made in the first decade of this medium, what we can expect?
February, 2000: Breathing a sigh of relief that we survived the Y2K conversion; a small group of men held a planning summit in Kuala Lumpur for a largely unknown consortium called al-Qaeda; Internet titan AOL had just entered into an agreement to “merge” with Time Warner and redefine the media landscape. Internet advertising never heard of Google or Facebook, expandables and page peels were percolating in a lab, and the CPM was still king.
February, 2010: Breathing a sigh of relief that we’ve largely avoided a Swine Flu epidemic; airline travel is more time consuming than ever; and Time Warner just completed its spin-off of AOL after a painful marriage.
A LOT has changed. But unfortunately, not enough. We’re spending more than ever on interactive media, but the efficiency simply hasn’t scaled with that growth. And when you look at the technology used today vs. ten years ago, very little has changed. Sure, we’ve figured out some new economic models to buy and sell consumers’ attention, but the methods of delivery, measurement and targeting are basically the same as they were in 1997.
Today, when we meet with clients and prospects, the triad of impression-click-conversion still rules decision-making. Interactive advertisers have very few options other than massaging the same data with techniques such as path-to-conversion and weighted attribution. The problem isn’t the math, it’s the data.
Ad serving, and soon thereafter bid-optimization, were both successful technologies because of the ability to consolidate both data and workflow. Consolidating the data was thought to be the only way to effectively deliver meaningful performance. But as the industry has matured, that couldn’t be further from the truth.A consumer’s perception of your brand and the interaction they’ve had with it (and I'm not just talking about purchases or customers – rather, any interaction) drives response more than any other variable. This is further demonstrated when performing conversion attribution. A recent study by a leading industry analyst recognized TruEffect™ in a wave study, as providing sophisticated attribution modeling worthy of recognition. The difference is the data. Not aggregated or consolidated data. Discrete data owned and controlled by the advertiser. Data that describes the relationship an individual consumer has with their brand.
It’s this new approach to leveraging consolidated platforms with discrete data sources that will push interactive campaigns to new levels of performance. Technology won’t be the foil, nor will new forms of content. Treat each consumer appropriately based on what they’ve told you about themselves and their interest in your products or services. And do so on an enterprise scale and in real time. That’s what we can expect to be talking about ten years from now.
– Scott Nelson
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