Salesforce: 2 major challenges eroding media’s competitive advantage
Most media companies have two major problems to solve today: friction and disconnection.
Salesforce’s media lead, Neil Robinson, laid bare these challenges to the industry in a recent webinar hosted by The Media Leader that discussed how advertisers and media owners risk “leaving money on the table” and hampering their competitive advantage.
This particularly impacts companies that “are not born digital”, Robinson explained.
‘Kind of crazy’: Data silos persist
Friction, for starters, is a drain on productivity because it is caused by having “no shared customer intelligence, no fully formed insight and lots of spreadsheets”.
But disconnection poses an even greater risk, because it leads to every touchpoint with a customer being “largely suboptimal”, Robinson warned.
“[Suboptimal means] you’ve missed a chance to connect with that person or that business with something new: a relevant idea, new capability, an additional service or feature. And as product lines blur, diversifying incomes becomes more compounding of the issue because you’ve got even more silos to bring to a customer.
“It’s kind of crazy when we know more about customers and consumers than ever before, but because that data around them is trapped in different islands, it’s under-utilised.
“And right now, the competition is super intense, be it retail media or anything else. That makes it really hard to compete if you’re not fully armed.”
Agency and media sales leads respond
That’s what we heard in the webinar, broadcast on 1 May, with a specially picked panel:
>> Emma Callaghan, executive director of advertising and strategy, Reach
>> James Fleetham, director of clients, marketing and research, The Guardian
>> Alexis Faulkner, chief transformation officer, Mindshare UK
>> Neil Robinson, senior director, media advisory, EMEA, Salesforce
Watch the webinar on catch-up here
Salesforce sponsored the webinar but all participation and reporting by The Media Leader is independent.
Conversation outline
- Introduction: What do we mean by “leaving money on the table”?
- What’s the biggest challenge you/your business faces as the media ecosystem broadens and expands?
- If money is being left on the table because existing operating models are still too siloed, which ones should/could we break down first? How could we do that?
- We heard the news about Google once again delaying the deprecation of third-party cookies. Does this change your expectations about how 2024 could be a significant year for media owners/advertisers making better use of first-party data?
- What role do you expect AI to play going forward? Are there any emerging use cases that are already proving to be significant or you think will be in the future?