White Paper
Closing the gap between data and customer experience: The practical path toward personalization as a growth strategy
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In today’s media landscape, it’s more important than ever to ensure advertisements not only get in front of the right audiences but also create lasting impressions.
But how do brands do it? According to the University of Southern California, consumers are exposed to as many as 5,000 ads a day. As our world becomes even more digital, with more channels and devices to engage each other, that number will continue to grow.
To break through the noise, brands need to leverage consumer insights and next-gen tech to create high-quality, tailored content that engages consumers in the right formats and on the right platforms.
With consumers inundated with ads, it’s critical for brands to stand out. But having the loudest voice in the market isn’t always effective, and as budgets get tighter, brands can’t afford spray-and-pray tactics or flashy campaigns. So, how do brands actually move the needle? Leveraging better consumer data and insights to inform their programmatic media buying.
It starts with accurately identifying in-market customers who are ready to buy. Brands have customer data that gives them a view of who their current customers are, but often they can’t connect individual customer interactions across every channel and device, or the data they do have is limited. This creates a fragmented, one-way dialogue: brands are talking at customers and not with them.
Programmatic media solutions grounded in identity resolution(not just identity matching) ensure brands know who they’re talking to, enhancing customer data to understand consumers more deeply: who they are, what they buy and browse, and where (and how) to effectively reach them.
That data creates an audience strategy not only for that customer, but for prospects who act like them. And it can exclude current customers and prospects who most likely aren’t interested.
To further increase their viewability, brands can conduct research exercises to gain deeper insights. By using digital conversations happening across both search and social media platforms, brands can reveal their current perception in the market and identify key focus areas for messaging and creative. This will make sure they are not only reaching the right customers but are speaking to them about what matters.
This person-first approach drives smarter media buying because it’s always optimized around the individual’s wants, needs, and journey, not based on broad segments or a specific message at any given point.
Reaching the right people is only half the battle, though. To gain real impact, consumers need to connect with the messages they receive. Identity resolution helps craft a vision of who a customer is, but without a way to use that vision to craft the right messages at the right time, brands might not impact conversion.
Consumers notice when ads speak to them. According to Epsilon research, 91% of consumer respondents said they see at least one irrelevant ad every single day, and 76% said they view brands negatively when they include inaccurate information about them in their advertising and marketing.
Programmatic platforms equipped with AI-powered demographic audiences can determine who is likely to convert and at what time, and what messages are relevant to them. Coupled with dynamic creative capabilities, brands can build personalized creative tailored to individual preferences, too.
This means real people are seeing ads that create a conversation with them, rooted in their behaviors and preferences, and all these digital experiences are connected seamlessly across all touchpoints.
With limited budget, brands want to know that their media is working. Programmatic buying gives brands the power to measure beyond basic metrics and transform reporting data into strategic insights.
A person-based approach paves the way for person-based measurement. Brands can measure the impact of media on business outcomes, understand what makes customers take action (both individually and in the context of a larger audience), and foster quality customer engagements with certainty.
Pulling together all these capabilities isn’t an easy task. It is possible with the right programmatic partner that can provide not only the technology and tools but also the strategy, vision, and expertise to make it happen.
What should brands look for? Insights-driven programmatic buying requires a technology partner with deep experience in data strategy for channel activation. Look for partners who have the right people and experience to shape these strategies, and the adtech and martech to execute them, too. And consider how your partners are integrating things like data, identity resolution, and AI into those strategies and tools.
Having solid data and technology delivers a foundation for advertising and marketing to break through the fragmented digital landscape and deliver seamless, relevant, and positive experiences for their customers and prospects.
