Blog
March 9, 2015
The growing demand for aligning ad delivery technology with marketing strategy
A study conducted last year by the CMO Council found a growing trend among marketers to ensure their technology decisions align properly with their company’s marketing strategy. “With an increasing number of technologies being added to the marketing toolkit, marketers are beginning to view technology as a key component of their overall strategy,” the report, entitled “Quantify How Well You Unify,” found.*
As the CMO Council report explains, “Marketers are challenged to improve the economics and value of random and disparate marketing cloud investments across multiple platforms and solution areas.”
How important is the decision on ad delivery technology to this objective? Very. “Digital customers now demand targeted, relevant and meaningful engagement at every turn. As more customers consider defection from brands because the information, content, services, promotions and engagements lack relevance and resonance, marketers must look to data-driven strategies that deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time—and in the right channel. Marketing must forge and reinforce the ties between technology, customer data and the customer experience,” the CMO Council reminds us,
This observation illustrates the role played by each technology solution involved in the creation, management, and delivery of an advertisement. Examining those interrelationships from the ad delivery standpoint underscores the role of five elements that link the consumer’s experience of an ad with an organization’s marketing strategy:
- Insight – An ad delivery solutions provider needs to demonstrate both knowledge and understanding in order to align its solutions with an advertiser’s marketing strategy. Achieving this level of wisdom about an advertiser’s ad delivery needs requires both market experience and technical expertise.
- Technical capability – This wisdom is necessary in order to create and implement the technology that is best suited to meet an advertiser’s needs. In addition to robust asset management and delivery capabilities, ad delivery solutions must integrate with the other partners in the marketing technology ecosystem, including the advertiser’s ad management systems, the content management technology used its by ad agencies and their creative and post houses, and the traffic management systems used by its media providers.
- Timeliness – As the CMO study notes, serving the right ad to the right customer also depends upon timeliness. Ad delivery solutions need to align with the growing demand for the near real-time ad-buying decisions that encompass multiple media platforms, including “live” linear media and on-demand content.
- Accuracy – A marketer’s ability to determine the effectiveness of an ad campaign depends upon solutions that help to ensure an ad was served where and when it was intended. This requires integration between the reporting solutions used by all collaborators in the media placement process.
- Quality – When advertisers spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on the creative to adequately represent the image they wish to have with consumers, they cannot risk an ad delivery solution that fails to ensure the bandwidth necessary for delivering a high QoE (quality of experience). End-to-end video quality monitoring is essential in order to ensure every touch-point for marketing creative adheres to high quality standards and provides assurance that the intended level of quality was maintained throughout the ad delivery process.
As the CMO study concludes, marketers who successfully manage and integrate technology can achieve measurable business and operational gains on their investments as well as better business upside. In order to accomplish these outcomes, the marketing technologies a company leases must demonstrate they understand your marketing strategy and can deliver solutions that align with it.