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In the past two years, the world has faced a cascading series of economic crises—from the COVID-19 pandemic, to ongoing supply chain woes, to creeping inflation, to the Great Resignation. Many (if not all) of these predicaments are due to global shifts beyond the control of any one company or brand. However, as a result of these myriad of challenges, brands are facing an unprecedented test when it comes to maintaining customers’ patience, focus and allegiance.
As supply dwindles, prices rise, and challenger brands emerge from the digital world to threaten the supremacy of legacy brands, brand loyalty is very much under threat. In 2021, more than 80% of consumers bought a different brand than their usual choice, driven largely by lower prices and/or dwindling supply. Of those, more customers said they’d prefer stick with their new brand than return to their old go-to’s.
In this cutthroat environment, marketers will need to embrace new tools and strategies to distinguish themselves from the competition—and, of course, to maximize their success once they’ve got someone’s attention. Three factors in particular are key to thriving: showcasing your brand’s values, creating a seamless omnichannel experience, and capitalizing on your data across all channels.
In a world of seemingly endless online options that are one Amazon click away from stealing your customers, brands will need to change how they advertise and present themselves to the world. One key for advertisers will be to go beyond products and services to highlight their brand’s heartbeat—i.e. the traits, culture, goals, mission, vision and community that brand embodies.
Generationally speaking, this is a matter of particular import. Studies have found that half of millennials and nearly 60% of Gen Z say they don’t trust companies, while around 40% of millennials and almost half of Gen Z believe most brands come across as inauthentic.
In an era where audiences have more choices than ever—and many millennial and Gen Z consumers aspire to support companies whose corporate values and “style” reflect their own—showcasing your ethos can drive brand loyalty in an era where stickiness is increasingly hard to come by. Ads trumpeting values and purpose help lend brands some much-needed authenticity, and that is a currency that’s always in short supply but high demand.
Once your brand has honed its voice and launched campaigns showcasing its “heartbeat,” it has to show it can deliver an experience that meets customers’ sky-high expectations wherever and whenever they want to engage.
Modern consumers expect a seamless, unified brand experience across all channels. As such, savvy marketers have increasingly come to rely upon omnichannel strategies. Again, this is particularly essential for brands that want to reach younger audiences, with 88% of Zoomers saying they prefer an omnichannel brand experience.
From the moment a consumer sees your ad on Instagram, to when they visit your website to learn more about the product, to their subsequent trip to your brick-and-mortar location for in-store or curbside pickup, to the follow-up emails you’ll send them showcasing other products or service they might enjoy, today’s customers want (and even demand!) a seamless and personalized experience. An omnichannel approach can ensure that brands not only convert more of their leads into customers, but that they keep them coming back for more.
However, if a company is going to truly capitalize on omnichannel marketing, it also needs a comprehensive and effective data strategy.
Dynamic data collection and data analytics solutions are foundational to any modern marketing campaign, but perhaps nowhere more so than omnichannel campaigns. Proper data processes can give marketers a host of key insights, such as where and when specific audiences are likely to spend their time, how your brand can best engage them, what products and services may make for repeat customers, and much, much more.
With the right lessons from the right data, marketers can confidently make the messaging, budgeting, and timing decisions they’ll need to create and convert as many opportunities as possible—or to make mid-campaign adjustments as necessary. And in a world where brand loyalty is tenuous at best, the ability to stay nimble and adapt to customer expectations is critical to success.
Change is constant. Consumers’ preferences are always evolving, and the pandemic has accelerated that evolution and brought about major shifts to many elements within the digital marketing world. Whether it’s eroding brand loyalty, DeFi advertising, or the future of cookies, marketers have no shortage of questions for the year ahead.
Our 2022 Trends Report walks through four of the key trends marketers need to know to keep up with consumers and stay ahead of the curve.
What's new in the realms of paid search and social media? Basis' Senior Vice President of Paid Search and Social compiles all the latest news, trends, and resources each month for easy access.
How the Metaverse Went from Sci-fi to Mainstream in One Year
The pandemic accelerated the use of digital worlds for work and entertainment. While Facebook’s rebrand to Meta helped put the word "Metaverse" on many people’s radar for the first time, a lot happened in 2021 to support this evolution. eMarketer provides a quick chronological recap of all the Metaverse-adjacent events that happened in 2021.
Platforms Catch Social Commerce Fever
It’s clear that social platforms prioritized expanded ecommerce features in 2021, although some are more sophisticated than others. eMarketer has compared and contrasted the features available on Facebook/Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest to show where the industry stands.
Insider Intelligence Q&A with Google Commerce: Understanding the Google Shopping Ecosystem
eMarketer recently spoke with Google’s lead of strategy, operations, and go-to-market initiatives for Google Commerce, Martha Walsh. Read this to get her take on the trends influencing consumer shopping behavior, how Google's relationship with brands has evolved in recent years, and what Google Commerce is doing to improve the ecommerce experience.
Pinterest Insights: Male Pinner Usage
The platform’s latest research reveals information about how their male user base is planning (and planning on spending) in 2022. More importantly, Pinterest provides some recommendations on how brands can get into their consideration set as searches and intent begin to convert into sales.
Brands Need to Leverage Customer Content Now
Luggage maker Calego shared insight into how they began leveraging UGC during the pandemic in this interview with Search Engine Land. The result was a wider top of the funnel than ever before, and higher than average conversion rates as they harnessed the power of customer reviews.
TikTok Tops Facebook and Google As the Most Visited Website
Cloudfare analyzed web traffic from 2021 and found that TikTok was the most-visited website and the most widely used social media platform of the year. This article also includes the other top 10 most-visited websites of the year, as well as the top social media platforms (in order).
How TikTok Drives Offline Sales Impact
Through a series of offline sales lift measurement and MMM studies, TikTok aims to prove how the platform drives offline sales outcomes and positive return on ad spend. Overall, the studies showed a 14% higher paid media ROAS compared to all digital media measured, and a 2x offline sales efficiency. In-feed video was, not surprisingly, proven to be the best performer against these metrics.
Report: US Social Video Advertising in 2022
eMarketer updated their forecasts for how much US advertisers will spend on video ads on social networks in the coming year. Spoiler alert: video ad spending will make up over a third of total US social network ad spending. The report also discusses how iOS privacy changes continue to affect social video advertising, and how advertisers are approaching video to drive both branding and performance goals. One key theme that stands out is marketers investing in more informal creative, likely as a result of the rise in popularity of TikTok.
Check out Basis' Video Unleashed Guide for a deep dive into how to leverage video advertising.
Report: Social Media Video Sees as Much Consumption Time as Traditional TV
A new study conducted by the Consumer Technology Association showed that user-created content on social platforms accounts for 39% of all weekly media hours consumed by Americans. The trend is more pronounced for teens, who spend more than 56% of their time with user-created content. The data shows the evolving shift away from traditional media and toward social media platforms as the key form of content consumption. As a side note: Google also recently weighed in on this topic on their blog, Think with Google.
New Year, New Snapchat Features
Snapchat released a few new features earlier this month to help make messaging with friends more expressive and interactive, including: chat replies in ongoing conversation strings, Bitmoji reactions in chat; poll stickers for Snaps and Stories, and improved video and audio calling capabilities.
For fast reference, Twitter recently published a comprehensive list of all the important events to plan your year around. You can use this link to navigate between months (and regions across the globe) for a better understanding of upcoming key moments.
FloC is dead. Long live Topics?
Some seven months after delaying the removal of third-party cookie tracking from its incredibly popular Chrome browser until 2023, Google introduced a new toy into its Privacy Sandbox: Topics API.
The search and ad behemoth’s new identity solution would pull in a user’s web history from Chrome, then utilize that information to assign that user up to five Topics (such as “Auto & Vehicles,” “Books & Literature,” or “Rock Music”) that advertisers could use for targeting relevant audiences. New topics would be determined every week, and after three weeks, old topics would be permanently deleted. Also of note: Google is officially putting an end to its FLoC experiment, thus ending the life of its previous (widely unpopular) proposed identity solution.
What does this mean for the advertising industry? Certainly, it’s far too premature to know whether Topics is really the future of targeting on the world’s most popular web browser (from the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most profitable online advertising business), but here is a quick look at the new proposal as well as some immediate takeaways:
Let’s start with the upsides. In a lot of ways, Topics looks like Google’s attempt to placate as many FLoC-related fears as possible while still maintaining a means for cross-site tracking based on browser history. As a result, Topics seems like a solution that may ultimately appeal to more stakeholders—but, as you might expect, not all stakeholders.
For advertisers (and regulators), Topics does not look like the sort of “power grab” that made FLoC the boogeyman to many in the industry and around Washington, while still providing key insights on consumer behavior that can help compliment a larger audience-driven marketing strategy. Publishers, meanwhile, have a blueprint for how their sites fit into to the new topic categories.
As for consumers, the new API’s simplified groupings and the absence of more sensitive identifiers such as “gender” or “race” may appeal to privacy-minded individuals who wish to remain more anonymous while using Chrome and retain more control of what advertisers can see and learn about them online. As Basis SVP of Media Operations Zach Moore puts it, “Topics seems like a much easier way to explain to privacy-conscious consumers that they themselves have the power in their own hands when it comes to targeted ads, vs. having to explain FLoC’s cohorts and algorithms.” Additionally, Google plans to empower consumers to easily review and remove topics from their profile, or to opt-out of Topics API entirely by simply turning the feature off, which may help some skeptics feel a greater sense of power over their own privacy.
Of course, it can’t all be good news, and there are still many aspects of Topics that Google will need to address—or at least iron out a bit—before any widescale implementation or adoption. For publishers and advertisers, Google’s initial draft around how they plan to categorize interests for Topics may be a cause for some concern. It would appear, at least for now, that Google intends to gather its behavioral data based on a website’s hostname alone—rather than the full context of a page’s URL—before bucketing those interests into one of 350 topics. That number makes Google’s list fairly distinct from, say, the IAB’s much more expansive content taxonomy.
However, this strategy may inherently overlook some meaningful contextual information and granularity that could potentially benefit advertisers, publishers and willing consumers alike. For example, someone visiting a website like Amazon or Target could place that user into the Topic of “Shopping,” but that information is much less helpful than knowing the full context of a specific page’s URL (ex. https://www.amazon.com/diapers/s?k=diapers), with which advertisers can infer much more about someone’s behavior and actual needs.Additionally, there will likely be many within the industry who question Google’s initial plan to cap topics at five per week. As Basis VP of Media Systems Ken Rood puts it: “I contain multitudes. Grouping me into five broad topics is good for privacy, but it may not be good for showing me the most useful advertising.”
As for privacy advocates, while Topics is clearly a step in the right direction as compared to FLoC, any browser-based cross-site tracking solutions are likely to face extraordinary skepticism, particularly when they come from Google. It also does little to allay the concerns of those who fear Google having an outsized influence on the online advertising ecosystem. Whether that proves to be a vocal minority or a larger segment of the population remains to be seen, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on in the months ahead.
In many ways, Topics looks an awful lot like another longtime advertising solution that has reemerged in recent years: contextual advertising. As we have previously detailed, contextual advertising shirks user data entirely and instead involves placing ads that are related to a webpage’s content. Topics, then, seems almost like a contextual advertising martini with a browser data twist. Whatever happens with Topics, the fact that it is so similar to contextual advertising only reenforces the important role that context will play in the future of digital advertising.
All in all, Topics may well be just another sign that there is no true “heir” to the third-party cookie throne. Instead, advertisers could be relying on a series of solutions (rather than one single solution) to stitch together their targeting strategies. One thing, however, still seems clear: in the land of the cookieless, first-party data will be king.
There will, of course, be much more to come on the topic of Topics, but the news is certainly a major development for the advertising industry and will undoubtedly be the subject of serious scrutiny in the months ahead.
In the meantime, media buying professionals are still looking for answers on the future of targeted advertising. For our perspective, check out Beyond Third-Party Cookies: Your Guide to Overcoming the Identity Crisis.
Finding a mentor is difficult in any industry, but the adtech world poses its own unique set of challenges for those seeking guidance in an ever-evolving field.
Renowned adtech sales leader, executive advisor, and ExchangeWire AdTech Personality of the Year Matt Barash has been a longtime beneficiary of mentorship and enjoys mentoring others as well. In this episode, he chats with host Noor Naseer about how to find well-suited mentors, how to make the most of mentor relationships, and reasons to become a mentor as you grow in your career.
Christine Kim is the VP of Client Learning and Enablement at Basis Technologies, and has been developing our certification programs since 2015. In 2021, Basis Certified was awarded Best Education Program by AdExchanger.
The Great Resignation has not spared the advertising industry. According to a new Advertiser Perceptions report, one-third of advertising professionals plan to leave their current positions within the next two years.
The same study found that most advertising professionals use an average of nine platforms for a typical ad campaign, and touch seven of those platforms on an average day.
The combination of these two statistics highlights one of the biggest challenges raised by the Great Resignation. Brands and agencies aren’t just losing employees—they’re losing highly skilled employees, who take a wide variety of technical qualifications with them when they go.
The top challenge when a team loses members is training new employees. So while it’s tempting to deprioritize employee education, companies would do well to set up robust training programs, now more than ever.
Below, I have dug into Basis Technologies’ approach to education. While I typically leverage these tips for educating Basis clients and the industry as a whole, they're just as important for internal training!
Don’t Be a One-Hit Wonder
In other words, don’t put together an education program and then forget about it. Engaging learners beyond the basics can be a struggle, but don’t let that deter you from creating a multi-level program that will cater to the entire learning process. After all, learning is a journey—not a destination!
Diversify Content Presentation
We’ve all been there: There’s nothing worse than sitting through an intensive training that consists of one person talking for several hours. According to a 2019 Forrester report, one training program saw completion rates increase by 50% when they broke materials from longer courses down into small modules.
Put the Learner First
The same Forrester report states that while there is a correlation between education and revenue, this is not the place to put revenue first. Think about what would benefit the learner, and the money will follow.
Harness the Power of Competition and Gamification
Who doesn’t want to win? At Basis Technologies, we like to throw in random trivia games or play a round of jeopardy to showcase how much people have learned.
Establish Key Performance Indicators
Allow yourself different KPIs for different phases of your education programming. For example, when first launching an on-demand course, the KPI can be registration numbers. Once your programs begin to mature, begin shifting KPIs to number of courses completed or overall time spent. When all else fails, it’s always a good idea to include a survey to receive feedback in real-time. After all, the people using your program will be best-situated to share what’s working and what’s not.
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Here at Basis Technologies, we cater to different levels of education as well as exclusive content for our customers through our Certified programs. Interested in learning more? Check it out!
Each month, Basis Technologies' Programmatic 101 series tackles a different facet of programmatic advertising—from best practices for buyers, to competitors in the space, to trends you should know.
Programmatic advertising has been around since 1994, but like a 90’s trend, it’s really blown up in the 2020’s. There’s no overstating the prevalence of programmatic: AdAge predicts that by 2025, 90 cents on the dollar of digital ad spend will be allocated to programmatic channels (up from 70 cents on the dollar currently).
In general, programmatic advertising can be defined as the automated buying and selling of digital advertising. In this post, we’ll take a look at the benefits of using programmatic technology, as well as the history that led to the automation, transparency, and accessibility we all enjoy today.
Back in 1994, AT&T signed a three-month agreement with Wired.com to showcase the internet’s first banner ad, pictured below:
By today’s best practices, this ad shouldn’t have performed well. It doesn’t contain a strong call to action and it doesn’t communicate any messaging about AT&T or even mention the brand itself. However, it delivered click-through rates (CTR) of 44%! That's pretty darn good, given that average CTR rate today ranges between 0.05-0.09%.
This one-to-one buy was the start of direct buying and while it had its advantages (relationship building, premium placements, flexibility with ad sizes and inventory) it was very manual. As the number of online websites increased, there needed to be a way for advertisers to automate buying so that marketers’ ads could serve a variety of websites. This led to the birth of ad networks.
A year after the first display ad graced the internet, the first display ad network was founded by an ad agency called WebConnect. Marketers no longer had to go from one publisher to the next, but instead could save time and money by working with brokers who could sell inventory across websites. Adoption was slow at first, but by 1998 there were a variety of competitors in the space who specialized in different types of inventory.
While this solved the problem of automation, advertisers started to realize that there was duplication across ad networks and that the intermediary cost of working with those networks was driving down efficiency.
In 1999, GoTo.com introduced pay per placement (what we know now as pay per click) and this new buying model had advertisers questioning what margins or fees they were paying to run on these networks. In 2000, when Google released AdWords, marketers started seeing the transparency that was possible and wanted greater control over their campaigns.
In 2005, the first ad exchange was born. An ad exchange is a technological platform that facilitates the buying and selling of digital media inventory, allowing billions of impressions to be bought and sold in real time via real-time bidding (RTB). What a mouthful!
This meant that marketers were able to use technology, instead of publisher contact or a 3rd party network rep, to inform their decisions about what advertising inventory they should buy in real time—aka RTB.
The evolution from ad networks to ad exchanges had a gigantic impact on the advertising industry as we know it. There were no longer fixed site lists, fixed pricing, or even fixed impression amounts. Instead, marketers were able to pay only what the demand was at the time their impression was served. In addition, publishers were able to use technology to automate selling their inventory.
Unlike direct buying, where marketers had to rely on relationships and minimum spends, ad exchanges and RTB allowed a more democratic approach to ad buying. Smaller brands and advertisers could tap into programmatic technology to stretch their media dollars further than they could before, and since everything happened in real time, there was no fear of premium inventory already being bought by the top advertisers in the industry.
So there you have it: The need for automation, transparency, and accessibility were key contributors to the development of programmatic advertising. But while the invention of programmatic technology brought more of these three elements to the advertising landscape, it also introduced more complexity. Our industry continues to strive for increased automation, transparency, and accessibility, an effort that paves the way for more innovation and better solutions for advertisers.
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Want to learn more about the fundamentals of programmatic advertising? Check out our free Digital Media Essentials course!
The modern marketing landscape is perpetually undergoing disruption. Blistering innovation coupled with the rise and spread of automation has cultivated an “always-on culture,” whereby consumers are connected everywhere and streaming anywhere. New mobile-first generational groups are arriving on the scene as true digital and social natives and, as a result, marketers are fighting to keep pace with unprecedented demand for instant gratification and personalized experiences. Society is firmly in the midst of a shift from being about the masses to a story bespoke for one, and marketing organizations have no choice but to meet that challenge head-on.
At the same time, general industry advances fueled by identity concerns and external pandemic-driven cultural changes have completely upended the advertising landscape as we once knew it. The third-party cookie will soon be deprecated. Privacy regulations are stricter than ever. Consumers are increasingly calling on businesses to do their part in righting social inequalities. In short, companies are now being held to much higher standards in realms that boardrooms have hitherto completely overlooked. And while many might assume these perspectives are only held by the younger generations (particularly Gen Z), they are in fact ubiquitous across all age groups.
To navigate these labyrinthine complexities, media buyers must be nothing short of exceptional in their execution. They must be nimble with their messaging, flexible with their timing, and swift with their movement of media budget. They must show conviction and assuredness in decision-making. They need attendant interoperability. They need connectivity. And at the foundation of all of that, they need high-quality, consolidated data.
When marketing organizations are armed with such, those pulling the trigger on campaigns have the weapons they need to unlock true peak performance. Harmonized dashboards that aggregate varied data sets empower media buyers with the clean, granular insights they need to understand not just what their customers are doing, but the all-important why behind it. This can then be translated into precision targeting through which brands are able to successfully satisfy and engage customers, elevate brand awareness among desired audiences, and accelerate performance to new levels.
Unfortunately, however, it is not so straightforward.
The industry’s predominant strategy throughout the last two decades has been to continually add more and more best-in-class single-point solutions designed to solve the challenges pertinent to the day. From the traditional outlets of newspaper, radio, TV, mail, and outdoor, marketers are compelled to add up to a dozen other disparate channels in the form of social, search, email, programmatic, connected TV, video, audio, native, push messaging, influencer, display...and on and on. This copious number of disparate data sources—and the overwhelming volumes of data they generate—mean it is just not feasible to respond to shifting consumer sentiments quickly and effectively.
A 2019 Domo report put some tangible numbers around these pressures, revealing that 83% of surveyed marketers at large enterprise organizations admit that the rise of new technologies and techniques has made it much more difficult to stay on top of everything. Almost half (46%) said the number of data channels and sources makes it challenging to plan for the long-term. The perils of data silos are not just related to an inability to organize or forecast either—they also drain personnel resources, fuel inaccurate targeting, and sap marketing budgets. In more extreme cases, data silos and the poor data they catalyze can lead to lost customers and revenue, and damaged reputations.
Indeed, with the consequences so profound and wide-ranging, marketing leaders must give data quality and consolidation its due. Movements within the industry would suggest that is beginning to happen. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2022, 70% of organizations will rigorously track data quality levels via dedicated metrics, improving them by 60% to significantly reduce operational risks and costs. And in the technology space, a recent report by Segment found that adoption of customer data platforms (CDPs) is picking up steam, with 73% of companies revealing that this form of software will be critical to their future customer experience efforts.
For too long, marketing organizations have held nothing more than a mere anecdotal appreciation of the troublesome nature of disparate data. They know it stymies output, but they don’t understand how, or why.
Here, we break down five forces converging on marketing right now and dissect why high-quality, consolidated data holds the key to navigating them all effectively.
As marketing organizations look to tap into the benefits promised by the new wave of technologies driven by automation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), their success in doing so and their ability to own and dominate their spaces will be entirely dependent upon whether they can get their data management houses in order. This has become increasingly important as connected devices proliferate at an extraordinary rate, causing an exponential growth to an already immeasurable trove of data—far beyond what any human analyst can feasibly manage and parse.
The explosive growth of addressable data is inherently great news for automation adopters. The more data that is fed into AI and ML algorithms, the more effective they are. This is only true, though, if the data upfront is high-quality. While the age-old observation “garbage-in, garbage-out" has been pertinent in analytics and decision-making circles for generations, it carries extra special weight when it comes to machine learning. The quality demands of machine learning are steep, and bad data could snowball quickly. If the historical data used to train the predictive model is inaccurate, the new data produced by that model designed to inform future decisions will be valueless—or worse, detrimental. Marketers can easily get trapped in a vicious cycle where, inadvertently, their data gets worse and worse and worse.
To properly condition a predictive model, historical data must adhere to rigorously high standards. First, marketers must have the right data: a plethora of impartial intelligence across the entire range of inputs on which the feed is set up to work with. Second, that data must be unambiguously correct: it must be accurate, clearly labeled, de-deduped, etc. And herein lies the problem plaguing advertising professionals: the vast majority are leaning on an average of nine platforms to execute a typical ad campaign—and touch seven of those platforms each day. Working under these constraints, data collection and delivery formats are commonly inconsistent and fragmented.
The knock-on effect of this is persistent difficulty preserving the appropriate structures and context that AI requires to drive effective automation. Even a minor error at just one step in bringing the data within those disparate platforms together will cascade, causing more errors across the entire process and potentially resulting in a wreckage of wasted resources and advertising spend. A consolidated data solution will future-proof the veracity of data collection and allow advertisers to make investment decisions with unerring confidence.
The introduction of data protection legislation, like GDPR in the European Union and CCPA in California, has fundamentally changed how organizations can collect and use consumer data. Governing bodies the world over are facing pressures to pass similar laws, and so it is crucial that brands know where all their consumer intelligence is housed and how they are keeping it secure.
Using centralized architecture that collates and manages data has quickly become an integral cog in the privacy strategy of most companies, empowering them to compile safe, compliant-ready audience segments. As marketers look to confront these regulations, they must consider implementing a combination of both consent management and customer data management tools. Let’s say Customer X gives Company Y consent to collect data via website cookies, but later requests the deletion of their data through email. It’s vital these actions be consolidated and organized in one single source of truth in order to avoid potentially devastating repercussions. Just ask Vodafone Spain. Or CaixaBank. Or Italian telecommunications operator, TIM.
The cookie has long underpinned the online advertising ecosystem, but massive change is imminent. Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple’s Safari already block tracking cookies by default, and now Google’s Chrome browser—which boasts a 67% market share—is set to join the fray, with plans to banish third-party cookies in 2024.
What this move presents is a new era of engagement for individuals, publishers, and marketers. It will require a switch to a trusted, people-based advertising ecosystem that relies on a deterministic, persistent identifier that relates to an individual user. By adopting this approach, marketers will be empowered to create cohesive, people-based campaigns revolving around real-time behavioral data and then activate them via major DSPs, email platforms, social networks, and other appropriate vendors. Essentially, it enables brands to meet their audiences in exactly the right places at exactly the right times.
All of this depends on one thing: strong, consolidated analytics. If this single customer journey is not tracked flawlessly, it will lead to incorrect assumptions about behavior that will ultimately give life to ill-designed marketing campaigns. Consolidated reporting is the “sine qua non” of successful people-based marketing.
Marketing was once a straightforward game. Creative agencies would be tasked with concocting a compelling message before handing that off to a media agency to push out across relevant owned and paid channels. Advertisers would then recline in their office chairs and (hopefully) watch their message reach the masses.
Of course, things are a touch more elaborate now...
Today, there are 4.66 billion active internet users. There are projected to be 3.45 billion active social network users in 2022. There are over 3 billion people who are now digital video viewers. The world is connecting at an express pace and marketing organizations need to recognize that there has been a fundamental shift in the landscape. Advertising at this moment in time is about what consumers are saying—not what brands want to say.
Modern consumers are a high-maintenance bunch: they want to feel understood. They want to feel valued. It is a sentiment summed up quite perfectly in this satirical video. Reaching and engaging them is getting trickier by the year, and so marketers are increasingly embracing an omnichannel strategy that comes with the promise of delivering a single, unified experience across different channels. While this was once considered the cutting-edge of innovation, it’s now a basic requirement for survival. The younger buyers of this world—those unknowing of a time without smartphones or social media—don’t even think of channels as having traditional boundaries. Instead, they increasingly evaluate brands based upon the seamlessness of their communication in addition to their demonstrated social and economic values.
But before marketers rush to implement an omnichannel strategy, they must first take a step back and consider their data collection and data analytics solutions. Without the appropriate infrastructure in either of these areas, value largely disappears—essentially, the absence of one renders the other useless. Marketers need robust data collection techniques to understand a range of important factors, including when target audiences prefer to interact, what type of messaging they engage with more, and what products or features they are looking for. On top of that, they’ll need powerful analytics to translate the big data into actionable insights. Marketers need to deploy one system of record that can distill cross-channel data in near real-time so they can course-correct campaigns on the fly and meet consumers in their moment.
Not so long ago, the mandate for marketing organizations was simply brand stewardship. Today’s reality is much different. Boardrooms across the globe are now turning the heat up on marketing teams and requisitioning them to prioritize driving real business growth. This is evidenced in a recent Salesforce study that found two in three marketers have realigned their priorities to focus on leading growth, and of all those surveyed, 96% believe the marketing function has a critical role to play in improving ROI.
The change has been speedy and can be primarily attributed to marketing’s unique position between a business and its customers, as well as its unprecedented access to the tools required to create flawless consumer experiences. There are indeed newfound expectations of marketing organizations, and many are having a tough time meeting them.
The main barricade is that growth metrics come in all different shapes and sizes. While revenue is the most conventional, there is also brand awareness, customer engagement, brand loyalty, conversion rates, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), relative market share, and more. With so much nuance to each of these areas, connecting investments to outcomes at aggregate and granular levels—in other words, formally proving ROI—is challenging. And even when marketers are able to effectively calculate ROI, they still run into issues. A survey conducted by Propeller Insights on behalf of Allocadia found that 61% of marketing leaders fail to use ROI in decision-making because they aren’t confident in their own data. This lack of assuredness can ultimately be traced back to the beginning of the ROI equation, where budget management is often done in multiple spreadsheets—a process highly susceptible to manual consolidation errors.
These barriers to full knowledge of ROI are directly related to an absence of a unified view of performance and real-time insights. By converging technology and data, it becomes much easier for marketers to integrate, manage, analyze, and optimize their campaigns as they work to tackle the growth directive across their organization.
There’s no getting away from it: marketing organizations need to be prioritizing data quality and data consolidation. Given that deep, predictive, reliable insights are foundational for making the best decisions, business leaders can no longer hesitate in this area if they want to accelerate their company’s digital transformation. Too often, marketers are forced to either guess what their data means or are held back by analytical bottlenecks. In an era where consumer preferences are ephemeral and media buyers must be agile to keep up, access to unified cross-channel reporting is paramount.
If data consolidation and real-time data reporting capabilities are at the top of your current wish list, get in touch with our digital media experts and have a conversation. With Basis Technologies, you can connect all your digital marketing campaign data—including programmatic, direct, search, social, and connected TV—with over 180 different business intelligence metrics via one interface. Basis is proven to improve efficiencies in this area by 48%. You can learn more in Forrester’s report, The Total Economic Impact™ Of In-Housing With Basis.
This is the sixth in an 11-part series of blog posts that focus on Basis Technologies’ corporate guiding principles, and how those values show up in the workplace and in the lives of our people.
Leadership is a complex ideology: as teams evolve, so do their needs. However, there are a few best practices that will always hold true.
At Basis Technologies, our guiding principle of Humility recognizes that there is no such thing as individual success in life. To follow this principle, we constantly acknowledge those who have helped us along the way, and know that team chemistry and collaboration are critical to achieving our goals.
I sat down with three Basis tech leaders—Jeff Smith (Dir, Production Operations), Victoria Bateman (Mgr, Data Operations), and Jonah Rosenberg (Sr Dir, Software Engineering)—to ask them how humility plays into their leadership philosophies.
Read on to check out my takeaways from this conversation—these five humility-focused practices are sure to benefit leaders of all kinds!
Jeff Smith: Ego is a toxic thing inside of an organization. It creates artificial hierarchies that suggests that good ideas can only come from certain levels in the hierarchy. Humility is the personality trait that negates that. At Basis Technologies we’ve always said, “check your egos at the door.” That’s because we know ego is something that prevents the best ideas from shining through.
Victoria Bateman: Basis Technologies values humility because it recognizes that team performance and success is greater than the sum of individual successes. The leaders of Basis Technologies show us every day that humility leads to openness and trust. This creates an environment that motivates employees and encourages innovation.
Jonah Rosenberg: Basis Technologies has always placed a key focus on hiring and retaining great people. To do that successfully, I believe leaders must show humility by providing growth opportunities for their team and placing their team members’ successes above their own. I try to practice "servant leadership”—delegating responsibility to my team members, placing a large emphasis on transparency throughout the decision-making process, and supporting my team by doing all that I can to help them to succeed.
JS: First, it’s about making sure people are calculating risks correctly. Taking a risk is only valuable if the payoff is worth it. You wouldn’t wager $10 to make $1. But you’d probably wager $10 to make $100. What does that tipping point look like for your team as it relates to your goals?
Being able to evaluate risks in the context of your larger goals is key. We create space for these risks by making them learning opportunities. Even when you miss on a risk, there’s tons of invaluable information to be learned, and chances are you’re going to learn much faster than you would have in a traditional setting. Being able to pull something positive out of a risk saves it from being a wasted effort.
VB: I try to show my team that I’m human, I make mistakes, and I fail. It’s my role to teach the importance of ownership when mistakes happen. Most importantly, I want my team to know they're in an environment where it's safe to fail, learn, and do better. I believe learning to fail forward is essential to innovation and growth as an individual, and as a team.
JR: I believe that to take risks, an individual needs to feel comfortable and supported by their leaders and peers. As a leader, I first focus on building trust with my team by forming positive relationships, showing that I care, and helping without micromanaging. If struggles arise and trust has been formed, then it’s a combined effort to fail forward together, which can be a positive learning experience for all to take into the next challenge.
JS: Think of the type of leader you’d want to work for. Do you want a bombastic, egotistical task master? Probably not. It all starts with vulnerability. I think to be a humble leader is to be a leader that’s comfortable exposing their vulnerabilities—both as a means of connecting and also as a means of humanizing yourself.
Leaders have warped perceptions of themselves because they often forget about the role power they have within an organization. I feel like I’m just Jeff, the approachable Ops guy, but other people might see me completely differently. I have to continuously work at letting people know that I’m approachable. Humility is a practice, something you have to live out. Remember that as often as you can.
VB: In my view, the first step to becoming a humble leader is acknowledging to yourself, and others, that you don’t know everything. The next step is committing yourself to lifelong learning. The best way of getting started today is to take a step back, to listen, to ask questions.
JR: Focus on achieving success by uplifting others. Set the example that it’s okay to make mistakes. Delegate autonomy to your team and find joy in your team members’ successes.
JS: Imagine the best marketing campaign ever for a product that doesn’t exist. Imagine a great product that nobody has ever heard of. Imagine a computer system so secure that nobody can use it in a meaningful way. We live in an increasingly complex world and as a result, we’re becoming more and more interdependent.
We have to measure ourselves on an aligned set of goals and objectives. If my team was measured on goals they can deliver on their own, the teams would optimize for that at the expense of the whole. As leaders we need to make sure we’re building goals that take the whole organization into account. That will also mean making sure people understand how their work fits into the larger picture.
VB: For me, encouraging collaboration is about two things. The first is modelling collaboration. I do my best to ask for input from my team or teams across the company when working on significant tasks or projects. The second is gratitude. I recognize other people’s contributions and give credit for every task or project they complete.
JR: Our teams place a high priority on hiring kind-hearted and supportive teammates. When team members want each other to do well, collaboration becomes easy – wins turn into team wins, and mistakes are about growing and improving for the future rather than placing blame. At our bi-weekly staff meeting, we have a standing agenda item for “Shoutouts” – a crowd favorite! Team members are excited to show their appreciation by raising up their teammates for the hard work they put in.
JS: Creativity is a hard thing to inspire because everyone gets their inspiration from a different place. The best thing I can do is provide a space for that creativity to take hold and that’s through empowerment. The simplest way to empower a team is to define the goal and the constraints and then leave it to the team on how to get there.
As a leader you obviously will have your own ideas, but keep those ideas loosely held. You’ll be amazed by the things people come up with when you’ve removed your own influence from the solution. For example: "Rent a truck to move this sofa to the new office" is a task that is filled with your own ideas on how it should be done. "Get this sofa to the new office" opens up a world of possible options for the team.
VB: Every individual on the team, no matter how long they’ve been at Basis Technologies, has new ideas to contribute and different perspectives to share. I regularly ask my team to take on challenging problems and new projects, and bring new ideas to the table. I want everyone on my team to feel empowered to have a voice.
JR: I try to lend autonomy to the team to solve the hard problems we’re faced with each day. By building a positive environment where team members want to help each other, opportunities arise to form safe spaces for differing opinions and ideas. I try to provide space for those quieter voices in meetings, which has become even more important virtually, and I expect my team members to do the same.
When we all support each other, we also challenge each other to grow and learn from one another. Focus on achieving success by lifting others up. Set the example that it’s okay to make mistakes. Delegate autonomy to your team and find joy in your team members’ successes.
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Learn more about Basis Technologies’ culture here.
After years as a niche interest with untapped potential, decentralized finance (or DeFi) appears ready for its big moment.
Conversations around the core components of DeFi—such as NFTs, cryptocurrency (i.e. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.), and blockchain technology—have grown from a whisper to a roar in recent months, and 2022 could represent a breakthrough moment for the latest tech phenomenon.
When it comes to marketing these elements of DeFi, there are ample opportunities...and several major challenges. Let’s take a closer look at a few of them:
Marketers have dived in headfirst into the burgeoning world of NFTs, seeing the creative and “FOMO”-driven opportunities offered by these unique digital assets. Brand-centric offerings like Taco Bell “tacos”, Asics sneakers, and even Charmin toilet paper (aka “NFTP”) have sold for thousands while garnering much-coveted media coverage.
NFTs are a still-burgeoning opportunity that present fascinating possibilities for marketers who want to get creative in utilizing this new technology. While many have seen these initial brand entries into NFTs as mostly PR-focused, marketers currently have an opportunity to shape the future of NFTs—be it into a momentary fad, a digital prize aimed at delighting superfans, or a first foray into the marketing metaverse.
One sign that the NFT market may be here to stay: Nike’s December 2021 acquisition of RTFKT, a company that utilizes “game engines, NFTs, blockchain authentication and augmented reality to create one of a kind virtual products and experiences.” The merger of sneaker culture—a famously passionate community—and NFT culture may well be a match made in digital heaven, particularly if NFTs are to become a more permanent fixture among collectors (and avoid turning into the virtual equivalent of Beanie Babies...)
With the recent $700 million naming rights deal that made the home of the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers “Crypto.com Arena” (not to mention the $135 million deal that renamed the Miami Heat’s home court “FTX Arena”), it’s safe to say that DeFi is hitting the big time. That said, concepts like cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and NFTs are still quite foreign to much of the population. Interest is high, with 86% of Americans reporting they’ve at least heard of cryptocurrencies and nearly half (48%) of US consumers saying they invested in crypto during the first half of 2021.
However, despite this rising curiosity and awareness, actual comprehension is still fairly low: a recent survey found that 96% of Americans could not “pass” a 17-question quiz on basic crypto concepts including cryptocurrency, blockchain and NFTs, and 24% of respondents to another survey said that when it comes to investing in crypto, they don’t even know where to start. When it comes to consumers’ knowledge of NFTs, things aren’t much better: a recent Forrester survey found that 45% of online US adults have never even heard or NFTs, while more than a quarter said they still don’t understand what NFTs are. As such, education is likely to be a key aspect of successful DeFi marketing efforts for the foreseeable future.
In the past, many blockchain-related ads have focused on the technology’s potential rather than its real-world impact. Meanwhile, ads for things like crypto have conveyed a sense of urgency (“Don’t miss out on this hot new trend!”) without necessarily providing any insight into what crypto actually is. Sure, Matt Damon is in TV commercials touting crypto saying that “fortune favors the brave,” but what about those millions upon millions of less-than-bold consumers who are just trying to figure out what the heck this whole crypto thing is?
If you want to stand out from the crowd and gain the trust of key audiences, your DeFi brand would be wise to market itself as trusted guides and experts in this new frontier.
This is still a fairly new industry—one that (at least in the United States) has mostly evaded any real governmental regulation. That may well change in the months ahead.
This past year, swift and decisive regulatory action crippled the booming crypto trading and mining markets in China. Then, in January 2022, both Spain and the the UK proposed new rules and regulations aimed at curbing misleading crypto advertisements. The odds of the US government implementing restrictions as dramatic as China's are unlikely, but DeFi advertisers would still be wise to stay cautious from a liability perspective.
Speaking of liability, scams are an increasingly problematic aspect of the DeFi sector. In 2021 alone, DeFi investors lost more than $14 billion due to fraud or theft, a 79% rise from 2020. That’s 14 billion, with a capital “B.” To make matters worse, some within the cryptocurrency sector are already making connections and drawing comparisons between behaviors in their industry and that of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was recently convicted of fraud. If this high degree of fraud continues in the months ahead (and keeps grabbing headlines), advertisers may be catering to a public increasingly skeptical of crypto, which could have a serious impact on marketing strategies.
Lastly, dozens of reports have noted the devastating environmental impact of crypto mining operations. With Gen Z’s noted passion around curbing climate change, advertisers in the cryptocurrency and NFT realm will need to stay mindful of those concerns as they develop their marketing strategies and try to address consumers’ growing fears around sustainability. Want a real-world example? Look no further than the outcry in response to Kickstarter’s recent move to the blockchain. Companies must think through the PR and marketing considerations (not to mention the ethical implications) of any such move or campaign going forward.
The continued emergence of decentralized finance is just one of the trends that will impact marketers in 2022. Want to learn more about some of the others? Check out our 2022 Trends Report to stay ahead of the curve as you plan your marketing strategies for the year ahead.