To more than 20 years of the beginnings of digital marketing (24 years of the famous first banner of AT & T, to be exact), today we live in an era with great capabilities that were unimaginable in those times.
Now campaigns are the most personalized in the history of marketing, impacting users on almost any device you use. However, many people are frustrated with advertising, including marketers.
Then and now
The entry to consumer first marketing is neither technologically nor operationally simple. In the beginning, when you bought campaigns on a few portals like Yahoo! and AOL, all the processes were manual and we only talked about impressions and clicks.
In a short time, the AdNetworks entered. In that era of Adtech 1.0 in which almost everything was manual, the big problem was that there was a lot of refereeing. Companies bought cheap inventory from the portals and sold it to advertisers dearly.
More than 10 years ago, Adtech 2.0 emerged: the era of programmatic marketing. This meant that advertisers could decide which ad to show and which person, in real time. Consolidating with platforms used by publishers such as Right Media, Atlas and DoubleClick.
In this age we can speak of two parts
The first was the use of programmatic technology for the automation of the old arbitration model. But the advertisers little by little became more demanding and privileged the transparency in the purchase operation.
The companies that continued with the arbitration scheme lost many of their clients. This can be seen clearly with the case of Rocketfuel, because when it went public it reached a valuation close to 2 billion dollars and 4 years later it was acquired for less than 150 million.
In the second part, we see the growth of transparent programmatic platforms; Companies created software to give advertisers tools, in order to have full control of the media and the data they use in their advertising campaigns.
Currently, we are in a new era: omnichannel
Here we can also talk about two parts. The first is the introduction of omnichannel campaigns of all paid media, including digital, TV, print, OOH, etc.; while in the second, there is the expansion of the true omnichannel, in which apart from paid media, we have our own points of contact, such as the website, email, chat, call centers and even the physical store.
It also includes the means earned, which are those of public relations, social media and any mention of our company. This is where you have the real opportunity, the administration of all points of contact, under a single conversation.
To enter the era of omnichannel, several challenges have to be solved
The first is that brands do not speak to people but to devices. And with the growing number of gadgets used per person, the communication appears fragmented and can damage the user experience, in addition to making advertising more expensive and inefficient.
The second is that advertising has lost the credibility of people, since a good part of users do not trust brands or advertising messages. If we add the concern generated by the information privacy issues, it is not strange to know that more and more people are using tools that block all advertising interaction.
Reaching customers from everywhere: We need to take advantage of that
With technology we must reach consumers through all their devices and act with the data obtained from all interactions. Users will feel much more satisfied when advertising aligns with their individual interests.
The offer of advertising spaces presents challenges such as combating fraud in activities, non-human traffic (and clicks), the generation of pirated copies of serious sites and the large amount of contents not appropriate for brands, which have cost them approximately 16 billion of annual dollars, globally.
Some initiatives
In this sense, important steps have been taken with initiatives such as ADS.TXT created by IAB, where companies report authorized places to sell their inventory. In this way, brands avoid appearing on fake sites.
For these challenges, technological solutions have already been built to identify the best prospects, activate them through all their devices, generate relationships in safe environments for brands and optimize with business results, in real time.
The use of these tools requires a deep involvement of both the brand and its agency. Definitely, for the current marketers, the entrance to the era of omnichannel (where the consumer is the center of the strategy) can not be given if the technology is still a black box whose operation is not known.
Also published on Medium.