Disruptive comms trends | 1. Real time marketing.

This week, Nextness will be home to ‘Five trends disrupting the communications industry,’ an in-depth report by James Collier (@james_collier), Head of Digital and Partner at STW’s Bohemia Group. This is Part One: Real time marketing.

Globally real time targeting and buying technology is advancing at quite a pace while instantaneous data processing and decision making systems are helping to put the right information in the hands of the right people, at the right time.  This combination of increasing knowledge and capability only leaves us with a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’ real time marketing will disrupt our industry completely.

What’s driving real time marketing forward?

We firstly have the accelerating investment in programmatic buying technology.  Although not ‘new’ (the first DSP was launched in 1999) the technology didn’t really find traction until 2007 when 5 of todays major DSP’s were founded and Ad-Exchanges became hot commodities with Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all acquiring smaller players.  Today Australia’s RTB market is the fastest growing in the world with 30% Q on Q growth¹, and although it will likely temper slightly across the rest of 2013 we’ll still see the marketing ending in substantial positive growth.

In addition to media agencies buying and refining digital in real time, marketers are exploring ways to pull through real time data streams to turn in market observations into in campaign optimisations.  A topical example of this in action was the power cut at the Super Dome during this years Super Bowl.  As social conversation grew the likes of Oreo’s, Calvin Klein, VW and Audi all used the event as a platform to share a highly relevant and timely message. In fact a recently published report² suggested that 53% of senior marketers would be looking at social analytics to help provide real time feedback on campaign activity.

Measurement.

However it’s one thing being able to market in real time, but if we can’t measure its contribution in the same way then is it worth the investment?  Unsurprisingly brand research organisations have taken notice of this emerging trend and are releasing or developing products that answer this question.  Millward Brown for example recently launched AdIndex Dash³, a specially designed brand tracker that analyses the impact of digital comms on key brand measures in real time.

Challenges.

It’s important to recognize that any shift toward real time marketing comes with its own set of challenges.

• There will be a significant resource impact.  Programmatic buying technology is a fantastic innovation but over time it will commoditize.  Therefore the most valuable element of any trade desk will continue to be the man or woman behind the tools.  However to truly deliver on the promise of real time the trade desk will need to be resourced appropriately thus ensuring that every marketing opportunity is capatilised on in the most effective manner.  This comes with an increased operational cost and potentially a higher staff requirement.  Both of which would put pressure on current agency / client commercial relationships.
• Existing agency and media/publisher relationships or terms of business would need to be changed.  Complete flexibility and transparency would need to be built in to each engagement along with an agreed set of measures to monitor in campaign performance.  The idea of a long-term deal or a volume trading arrangement would certainly encumber the ideal of true real time marketing.
• Creative agencies will need to be ready to adapt inefficient creative on the fly.  As campaign insights and consumer feedback filter through social channels there stands a very real opportunity to optimize the creative voice mid campaign.  This may extend beyond tweaking in market creative to actually developing new collateral to amplify a behavioural response and generate additional word of mouth around a brand.

And lastly, agencies will need to invest in data management and visualization platforms.  The sheer volume of data available to process will require a central data nerve center to process and visualize ready for interpretation and action.  Without it, the value that lives in the data will always remain one cell away from discovery.

Sources.

1. Emarketer & The Rubicon Project RTB Report Q4 2012.
2. InfoGroup Targeting Solutions 2012 Social Analytics Report.
3. Millward Brown Challenging Channels Report 2013.

James Collier (@james_collier) is Head of Digital and Partner at STW’s Bohemia Group.