Two weeks ago was a week of firsts for me.
- My first time visiting New York City.
- My first time attending Advertising Week.
- My first time being in a business development role at an event.
Because of these firsts, I have an interesting perspective on some of the main topics that prevailed throughout the conversation at Advertising Week 2015. The company that I work for, People Pattern, and the vision for our product also gives me a unique lens by which to analyze what these topics and conversations mean for the industry as we head into 2016 trying to reach a consumer that is increasingly shunning our unwanted advances.
Some of the main topics of the week included: Ad Blocking, Authenticity, Data-Driven Marketing, Programmatic advertising and other technological advances to reach the consumer at scale.
There is an innate conflict here. On one side sits the need for advertisers to reach consumers in a more efficient and holistic manner across a diverse and fragmented media landscape. On the other side, a consumer that has given up so much personal information about themselves to advertisers that they now demand that the industry start to use it to tailor their messages in meaningful ways that matter to them individually.
Humanity is built on the concept of relationships, but relationships are hard to scale. Which poses a major obstacle for advertisers. An obstacle that I believe People Pattern is built to solve.
Because of this obstacle, we’re constantly searching for new ways our brands can “connect,” “touch,” or “interact” with our consumers. Looking for and investing in meaningful moments that will deepen our “relationship” and make our brands more essential to our consumers’ lives. We invest in creative approaches, strategic messaging and the newest technology to make this connection more relevant, more timely, more real…but is it?
Are we really connecting with our consumers in a way that feels like we understand them like a good friend? Or conversely, does most of our advertising and marketing feel like the dreaded follow up emails or mistakenly picked up phone calls from people you met at a convention and chatted with for approximately 3 minutes and 37 seconds while you waited at the bar for the next drink?
According to eMarketer, “Higher response and engagement rates are the No. 1 reason to use personalized content, according to June 2015 polling from the CMO Council. It was the only benefit cited by more than half of senior marketers worldwide who responded to the survey.”
And in a separate study, eMarketer reported that “in Q2 2015 research by the CMO Council and Ebiquity, one-third of marketers in Europe and North America said their ability to analyze data to create personalized experiences was poor or very poor.”
I met close to 200 people at Advertising Week. Some were simple 30-second interactions and some were hour long conversations over dinner and drinks. As a professional whose job it is to build and cultivate business relationships, I’m faced with the same challenge as many marketers–how to make each interaction feel as if it’s of equal and significant importance.
The fact is that we don’t get to have a personal face-to-face conversation, share a drink and close with a warm handshake with each of our customers. To date, our best efforts in this area consist of technology like site cookies, first party data gathering, 3rd party data augmentation, Shopping Cart tracking, and social listening.
But these aren’t the sources of information you built your best friendships upon. These are the sources of information you used to inform your marriage proposal to your significant other.
A cookie is not a handshake and a handshake is not a relationship. Relationships are messy and they are deep seeded in trust. A trust that comes from truly knowing one another and communicating based on that knowledge.
These sources of consumer information are static, structured, fragmented and often times disjointed data points that can lead us to believe and action against insights that may not be what they seem–creating distrust among our consumers and telling them that we really don’t know them as well as they thought we did. Marketers need more meaningful insights that actually aid in the building of relationships with their consumers. To find out more and uncover your own insights, request a demo of the People Pattern platform below.
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