When was the last time you saw an ad from a brand you are engaging with online and had to wonder – don’t they know I am not interested in that or even worse that I have that product already? Seeing bad and bland advertisements follow me around has become quite annoying and it is something companies can change easily – if they just would bring their technology investments closer together.
The convergence of Adtech and Martech has been discussed and written about as much as Big Data, Cognitive, AI or Machine Learning (probably). However, it remains a topic not a lot of companies out there have figured out.
The number of times I have been asked recently for my opinion on DMPs, DSPs and social advertising has been constantly growing, but so has the confusion. Often I am astonished on why people want to buy specific solutions at all, instead of first reviewing their use cases and then either leverage their existing investments or go to market.
For me the journey into this space started when IBM released it’s innovative approach for marketing API connectivity called Universal Behaviour Exchange (UBX). So let me first introduce you to UBX:
The typical environment in marketing uses 30+ different solutions to engage customers. UBX is an open exchange that makes it easy to share customer data between certified solutions, bypassing the custom IT work typically required to integrate these systems and speeding time to market from weeks to just one day when creating new campaigns.
Sounds good? It has been part of every technology conversation I had in the last 12 months.
Now fast forward to the release of the integration into DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM) around November 2016. DoubleClick by Google (specifically DBM) is one of the biggest demand side platforms (DSP) out there. It is basically used by almost all of the companies I deal with. So obviously this connection via UBX became very interesting.
Doing some reading you can easily find some great suggestions on the topic of better integrating advertisement technology investments with their marketing technology counterparts. I can especially recommend the Forrester study by Joe Stanhope: “A More Perfect Union: Adtech And Martech – Convergence Will Revolutionize Marketing – Coexistence Isn’t Enough In A Post-Digital Future“.
He makes great recommendations on the convergence in the adtech and martech space:
The new UBX DBM integration is applying the recommendations from the report by leveraging existing investments and taking it a step further. IBM’s UBX basically brings the DSP use cases right into the core platform investments from IBM’s customers.
20% optimisation potential is substantial. It all is based on a simple scenario: you do not want to advertise your products to your existing customers – especially if they have already taken up your offer. To make it more specific – you want to remove them from advertisement as close to real time as possible. This does not only improve the customer experience, but also saves valuable advertisement budget to be better invested. So simple sounding, but yet so hard for a lot of companies out there.
So how does this integration between the Watson Customer Engagement platforms and DoubleClick Bid Manager work? 4 simple steps:
Once published, the final audience moves into the DBM platform and is available as an audience.
The real magic happens behind the scenes. The real value is in the so called delta between the customers who have received the advertisement in the past and have to be now either added or subtracted from the audience. This may be due to them either having taken up the offer (of the advertisement), or now being eligible for it. The IBM systems of record keep track of the engagement via DoubleClick Bid Manager and can easily calculate the delta between the audience in the original advertisement and customers who have either acted on it, or are now eligible for it.
The below screenshot shows the user interface and the options for adding new records or removing them. A very simple but yet powerful integration pattern between core marketing platforms and the advertisement counterpart.
As always there are early starters and late achievers. I am very happy to say though that more and more IBM customers out there are asking for this specific integration patterns to simplify their use cases. Especially as you get UBX as a valuable add-on to the core Watson Customer Engagement platform. Consumers are asking for more personalisation on all the channels they interact with.
Jessica Liu and Samantha Ngo try to differentiate in their Forrester study on: “Real-Time Processes For Real-Time Social Marketing” between the old Campaign state and the new Always On state. Always on is not new. Companies just need the right approach and the right solutions to live up to the challenge. A challenge a lot of companies especially in AP have experienced before their worldwide competition.
A good example is MasterCard. Clement Teo emphasises on why it is so important to adapt in his study on the changes the credit card company applied due to the consumer behaviour in AP. He summarises that: “Asia Pacific consumers are digitally empowered, socially savvy, and always mobile. To win, serve, and retain them, MasterCard’s marketing organization has embraced digital to provide timely, relevant, and personalized experiences – acting on insights drawn from its real-time marketing analytics platform.” MasterCard probably does not use UBX to achieve this (yet), but Clement Teo makes a great point on what the underlying market drivers are and why companies out there need to adapt – fast.
ING Direct is aware of this need and embraces it. Claudia Lane gives a good example in her comments on what the bank is trying to achieve:
So as the market is catching up, the real interesting question is beyond the mere integration of advertisement bidding into the marketing technology stack and vice versa. The next level of convergence happens when brands will start to embrace their real-time investments to search for the next best action – in advertisement and link this to decisioning engines, such as IBM Interact and then allow the whole system to learn and optimise.
The new frontier after that? Introduce Watson to apply “Cognitive Bid Optimization“.
https://youtu.be/zrzFJyw_1fo
IBM is one of the top B2B businesses in the world, inbound traffic is critical to it’s marketing success. In 2015, IBM spent over $86M in the US alone on banner advertisements to drive traffic.
“Because of the volume and the dollars involved, trying to save those fractions of a dollar, or fractions of a cent, really matters to us,” says Ari Sheinkin, VP of marketing analytics at IBM in an Ad Age article in 2016. “What makes this really exciting is the system learns. That’s the essence of cognitive.”
Brittany Kirkland describes in an article 2016 what this Cognitive Bid Optimization can mean to the convergence of adtech and martech: “Through rigorous A/B testing, initial pilots have shown that our Cognitive Bid Optimization model can improve cost per conversion significantly. At its best, we have seen as much as 71% reduction in cost per conversion and as we continue to test, we expect to see consistently improving results.”
We may not be there yet to make the whole process cognitive, but to me this is one of the most interesting areas for marketers to keep an eye out. UBX is a start and the connection to DoubleClick is one of the most valuable integration patterns I have seen in a long time. Bringing Cognitive Bid Optimization into a ready-to-buy product will be the next step for IBM. 71% reduction in cost per conversion and other positive results will be hard to ignore.
