By: Neil Joyce, CEO & Co-Founder of The Customer Lifetime Value Group
Yes…you read it right…at a time where we are living with more restrictions than many of us have ever experienced before both personally and professionally, could it be that we are on the cusp of options that we didn’t think were possible?
Taking away the well publicized antitrust cases and the industry based negative press against the Walled Gardens, we believe there are positives that those businesses have provided us as Data, Marketing and Advertising professionals
If we were in a virtual room right now, we would be nodding that it makes sense that reaching customers with relevant communication and being there for them when they need you delivers business results. For years we wondered how we could take the addressability of Direct Mail, Email and SMS and apply it across as many channels as possible. We also relied upon our customers and prospects to raise their hands directly by a call to our call centers when they needed us, or paid a visit to our website or store to make a purchase.
Google and Facebook changed that with their innovative search and social platforms that created a new way of precision and performance marketing. But as with anything new and exciting, it matures and it can also become a dependency. Which creates a to evaluate what can be done?
Cold Turkey and shift all budgets away from said platforms? Who has been brave enough to try this beyond short-term periods of reducing budget and or boycotting said platforms, whilst still reaching customers as a business driver?
Ok, so practically this is tough to do, yet when I say we have the opportunity for optionality, we absolutely do. We are seeing it through the work we have been carrying out with large brands and publishers over the last 12 months. What may at times feel like a CFO questioning media spend with the CMO or at an operational level the over-hyped fear mongering of many across AdTech on the demise of the cookie, there are growth opportunities and genuine reasons to see optionality as a reality. Without beginning to sound like Boris Johnson, “there is light at the end of the tunnel”… there are emerging choices to take your CRM best practices and the success you have seen in Google and Facebook to another level. Why not review your current PMP deals, consider the emerging addressable TV platform capabilities globally, talk directly to your Media Publisher partners, many of them are looking at their People Data and Identity assets in news ways to harvest your demand and also improve the experience of their users. Dare I say the word…options!
As with all data backed arguments, let’s start by defining a hypothesis or at a minimum writing some questions down:
Google and Facebook currently take 80%-90% of my digital marketing budget…what would it mean and what would it take to change that by 5-10% in the next 12 months? With no negative impact to business performance and identification of upside revenue opportunities. For example, delivering higher margin revenue back to the business directly.
If this does not ring true or ultimately shows that you cannot shift away, you still have noteworthy options…those being to double down on Paid Media with Google and Facebook, whilst creating new efficiencies in reducing AdTech tax on redundant technology.
No predictions here, just options and final thoughts for your consideration:
– Data, it is yours and your customer’s data. They trust you to decide where it goes and more importantly how you use it to build value with them vs how you use it to contact them.
– Options – you have genuine opportunities to diversify away from Google and Facebook dependency. There are media publishers out there who are developing propositions for you to shift spend without decreasing reach or performance.
– Innovation & Trust – crack the above and the “Cookie Armageddon” becomes what it should be…an AdTech issue. The advent of trusted and collaborative technology platforms such as Safe-Haven’s are here to change things up and enable the art of possible with what can be achieved with Data.