What the collision of adtech and martech means for marketers
The marketers’ holy grail of a single customer view is still some way off, attendees heard at the panel, When World’s Collide: The Impact of The Collision Between Martech and Adtech at Mumbrella360.
Toby Gabriner, Gavin Merriman, Clement Tsang, Fiona Moylan, Danielle Uskovic and Andrew Birmingham
While the martech and adtech worlds are coming together in the view of AdRoll’s Toby Gabriner, he believes it is more helpful to consider marketing and advertising data as three groups by splitting what’s normally considered marketing data into personally identifiable data and more anonymised cookie information.
“There are three pillars we should be looking at, there’s ad tech which is the execution layer, we need to break out the data piece and look at it as cookie data versus first-party data. I think there’s a pillar of data with martech being more the PII type data.”
Managing all of this data is the biggest challenge as Fiona Moylan, the global director of digital and e-commerce at Jurlique International, discovered when her team set out to standardise the company’s customer information.
“What slowed us down, was what I thought we had nailed – the cleaning of the data. I would never had thought the challenges around governance and building the team,” she said.
Having spent six months cleaning and normalising the data, Moylan is now looking at getting a return on that investment before extending into the adtech field.
“Adtech is something sitting out there which sounds fabulous. We have just completed a CRM strategy built on clean customer data based in Australia. Getting a full 360 degree view. My mind right now is on ‘sure bets’ with the customers I now have.”
The cost of the major vendors’ cloud is a major concern for clients with both Moylon and Lenovo’s head of digital and social Danielle Uskovic agreeing that the prices being asked by providers such as Adobe and Oracle put them outside their budgets.
AdRoll’s Toby Gabriner on the Mumbrella360 panel
Gavin Merriman, the global head of digital at Nude by Nature, pointed out most companies’ marketing departments will choose more affordable, best-of-breed products that meet their needs, something Clement Tsang, head of consulting at Cadreon, agreed with, pointing out that being selective avoids substantial professional service fees in implementing a major vendors’ solution.
Lenovo’s Uskovic also pointed out a lack of transparency in vendors’ platforms makes them unattractive to customers – “There needs to be open APIs, there needs to be more transparency with the technology providers, it makes it very hard as a brand.”
“Adtech is something that’s sitting out there which is really impressive,” added Moylon, “but right now what I’m living and dying by is martech in terms of what our customer is doing.
“In terms of how I connect the two I’m at least 12 months before I start the journey. Right now it’s about accurate data and the customer journey.”
AdRoll’s Gabriner sees merging of technologies making systems easier to use.
“The biggest win is simplicity, the complexity of managing these technologies. If we can start to develop technology systems that makes it easy for the marketers then that’s a major win.”
Overall the panel agreed there’s great potential for the merging of advertising and marketing technology sets, even if there’s some way to go.
“It’s such an exciting brave new world, the data sits there and the question is how we make this meaningful for advertisers,” stated Cadreon’s Clement Tsang.
This was more like the collision of too many panelists for a 45 min session.
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