Opinion: Intuition, Tech & Online Advertising

As websites become ever more sophisticated and advertising budgets increasingly shift towards online, marketers are now using tools that allow them to better understand audiences, build on consumer data and make their online campaigns more effective.

 

David Ogilvy once said: “If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language; the language they use every day, the language in which they think.”

 

Today’s data-rich websites offer the possibility to target customers based on their actions, in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

 

Brands are increasingly convinced by the benefits of real-time media buying, and as the advertising technology sector moves closer to the core of what marketers do every day, the challenge for tech companies, including Turn, is to cut through the jargon.

 

Technology offers unprecedented insights into consumer data management and analytics systems. At Turn, we analyse audience and huge amounts of data and each quarter  we compile these insights to define the most interesting consumer groups worldwide (www.turn.com/digitalaudiencereport). Identifying their most valuable customer profiles and then extending the reach of a campaign by showing ads to people who match those profiles, enables businesses, be they insurers, car companies or fashion brands to move closer to their consumer.

 

We recently worked with fashion retailer Reiss and digital agency Threepipe to find the best way to home in on luxury shoppers, boost brand recognition and drive shoppers to the Reiss website, whilst also driving down cost per acquisition. By focusing on the right audience in the right place, we were able to help Reiss fine-tune its campaign, in real time and achieve impressive results, with a return on investment of 200 per cent.

Recent advances in marketing technology have enabled advertisers to successfully capture consumer data and transform it into valuable insights. As a result, marketers now have the opportunity to better understand and leverage consumer data to acquire new customers, as well as drive loyalty and engagement with their brand. Marketing technology provides the tools that help marketers simplify workflow and to ultimately reach their consumers wherever they interact with brands – through display, mobile, social media and video.

In this era of innovation in the science of marketing, data only contributes to business results when it’s paired with intelligence and intuition. The technology simply acts as the tool that enables open-minded brand marketers and media buyers to utilise the insights to inform and drive their decision-making. We’re fast reaching a point when data can and should underpin marketing strategy. New opportunities are continuously emerging within the digital and consumer engagement sphere – and the ad industry will need to continue developing the tools that help brand marketers stay ahead of the curve and move with their customers.