Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Customer

By Adam Saunders     April 28, 2009     Tags:

IBM recently came out with a research report titled “Beyond Advertising: Choosing a Strategic Path to the Digital Customer ,” By Saul Berman, Bill Battino and Karen Feldman. The report covers familiar ground for marketers, but should still be an interesting read, because it is chock full of survey data and puts numbers to many trends currently taking shape.

These reports are also interesting in that they provide insight into what IBM is thinking in terms of its role in the industry. Naturally, IBM is quite excited about the explosion of analytics in advertising. IBM seems to have great plans to help advertisers move to that brave new world “beyond advertising” with new data management, analytics, and targeting tools. While impartial and objective in tone, these research reports represent a key component of IBMs marketing strategy. Most marketers don't think much of academic papers, but they are well worth the investment when you are selling complex and expensive services to a select and highly educated group.

The report seeks to show that “the senario of the future is consumer centricity,” i.e. highly targeted and relevant advertising delivered in the format most appealing to the consumer. The key factors preventing the industry from achieving consumer centricity according to the report are the following:

  • New format uncertainty - Particularly in the new economic environment, there are questions about the growth of new formats like advanced TV and mobile
  • Fragmentation - Large number of suppliers in new advertising formats, and there is no agreement on format specifications.
  • Siloed operating models - There is limited cross-platform integration of campaign support tools, processes or organizations to enable the selling, tracking or delivery of integrated, “know-me messaging.”
  • Data glut - Enormous amounts of information exist, but are difficult to access given the lack of consistency in data structures, metrics or analytics.

These are certainly major problems. No matter how much we wish it were otherwise, the big ad agencies are just not that tech savvy. Traditional industry titans are being blindsided by technology and innovative business models. However, just when we were starting to feel really bad for Madison Avenue, the report suggests “Four capabilities to enable consumer-centric marketing”:

  • Innovation – The industry needs to encourage experimentation and create a horizontal business structure that allows for broad participation in the creative process, including user generated content.
  • Insights – Data management systems need to be created that allow for integrated insights across all platforms along with more granular measurement and contextual targeting. Customized dashboards of key metrics will allow executives to measure performance in real time and make better decisions about how to deploy advertising.
  • Collaboration – As consumers continue to fragment the resulting complexity and number of deals grows exponentially. There must be a move from proprietary models to systems that support open collaboration based on cross-industry standards for sharing advertising content and data.
  • Workflow – Consumer-centric marketing requires a transition from manual and analog to automated and digital processes. Creating and managing micro-versioned advertising for a variety of consumers and devices simply requires to many steps to be handled by traditional manually intensive workflows.

To be sure, IBM has products and services to sell for each phase of the transition to consumer centric marketing. Unfortunately, their customized dashboards, collaboration tools, and workflow management systems will probably not be released in any kind of consumer friendly version that small businesses can easily implement. For now, we will stick with AdWords, Google Analytics, SugarCRM, Drupal, and the many other Open-Source tools that help small businesses achieve these same objectives. However, we will keep an eye on developments at IBM and hopefully, get our hands on some of their new marketing tools to review in the near future.