Taking people-based marketing beyond Google and Facebook
Advertisers should take all they have learned about people-based marketing and move it beyond the walls of the tech giants, writes Signal’s Neil Joyce.
Unless you were on an exotic holiday in one of the far corners of our earth without access to technology, you’ll have heard about the fantastic financial results both Facebook and Alphabet published earlier this month.
Google’s advertising business drove its sales revenue to $19.08 billion (up 17 percent from 2014) and Facebook’s advertising revenue hit $5.64 billion in Q4 of 2015 alone – demonstrating the popularity of customised audience offerings, and the outcomes advertisers are getting with these industry behemoths.
These technology giants grew up in step with shifting consumer behaviour. People today are more connected than ever, interacting with brands all day long across web and mobile devices.
Today’s always-on world offers advertisers more channels and devices for engaging consumers, but that doesn’t mean the task is easy. In fact, the complexity of targeting the right customers with the right messages is greater than ever. The web cookies that advertisers have relied on for 20 years in their targeting strategies don’t work in many mobile environments, wreaking havoc on their ability to connect with consumers and measure outcomes.
The key to Facebook and Google’s success lies in their dedication to developing “people-based” solutions to help advertisers succeed in this environment. People-based advertising links ads to actual people rather than cookies to provide more accurate and precise targeting.
Facebook’s Custom Audiences has been a digital starting point for many brands in using their first-party data for ad targeting. Late in 2015, Google rolled out its Customer Match targeting option for advertisers to reach individuals via email addresses tied to Google accounts. And Twitter offers a similar service, Tailored Audiences, to reach its users.
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With a people-based approach, advertisers and publishers can reach individuals rather than broad demographic categories or a nebulous collection of cookies. But if my recent conversations with brand- and agency-side marketers are anything to go by, we are at the beginning of yet another shift the in industry landscape.
In this next phase we are seeing advertisers dive more deeply into the powerful world of addressable media. They are taking steps to extend the success of people-based targeting outside of Facebook’s walls, across all the myriad publisher sites where their customers can be found.
A global agency I met with recently revealed they’re ramping up their addressable media budgets from 5% to 50% over the next 18 months, and top digital marketers from the likes of GSK, Nestle and Reebok have all spoken publicly about wanting to extend their addressable ad spend and strategy beyond closed ecosystems to fully round out their campaigns, without limiting their presence.
These are just some anecdotes that demonstrate that advertisers are looking at new ways to pursue people-based marketing beyond the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google through collaboration.
Some new approaches are already in action. For example, advertisers are reaping the benefits of working with Yahoo Japan, which realised the enormous opportunity in sharing its consumer data with advertisers creating an open platform for targeting known customers at scale.
But, as Facebook’s Jennifer Kattula said last year, “[n]ot all people-based marketing is created equal. The only ad tech solutions capable of finding and engaging directly with consumers are the ones that deliver accurate, authentic insights about real people, based on persistence and scale.”
I couldn’t agree more. As advertisers explore people-based solutions, they need to consider the following questions:
– How long does it take to import data and act on it? Real-time relevance is crucial for addressability.
– Who holds the data? If a brand owns actionable customer profiles rather than renting them from a third party, the possibilities for effective cross-channel marketing now and into the future are limitless.
– Are customer profiles always available across channels? This is a requirement for targeting anywhere, anytime, not just on one platform or campaign.
The real-time, people-based marketing technology that’s emerging today enables advertisers to adopt the same ‘custom audience’ approaches that have produced such great results on platforms like Facebook, while driving engagement beyond those walls – taking the great ROI they’re already seeing from people-based advertising approaches to a whole new level.
Neil Joyce is managing director EMEA at Signal.