The Present and Future is Programmatic Marketing

Forrester reports that marketers are quickly shifting their budgets to digital forms of advertising:

More than half of the marketers we surveyed said that effectiveness of direct mail, television, magazines, outdoor, newspapers, and radio would stay the same or decrease within three years. In contrast, well over 70% expected the effectiveness of channels like created social media, online video, and mobile marketing to increase. The result is that digital [advertising], which will be about 12% of overall advertising spend in 2009, is likely to grow to about 21% in five years. Along the way overall [non-digital] advertising budgets will decline.

Change is coming to digital advertising in these ways:

Traditional advertising agencies rely on broadcasting their creative ideas to mass audiences. They focus primarily on aesthetics. But mobile consumers are quickly bored with repetitive advertising. Instead their attention is held by salient information, including news. Agencies must work with software developers to reach target demographics. In the future, software specialists will lead the advertising process rather than follow. We’ve seen this already in other mediums like games, first with special effects — but now entire movies are virtual renderings done by programmers.

Traditional broadcast and print media are less powerful today. Content that once traveled through broadcast and print channels are not online, on-demand. We believe the most effective digital advertising in the future will be driven by software algorithms that present relevant data to consumers. Google now qualifies at the world’s biggest advertising agency. Their one and only aesthetic achievement is the Google logo. All their advertisements are driven by software algorithms.

Social media and real-time data will become critical for advertisers in understanding customer preferences. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is just a parallel universe created to address the brittleness of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. Enterprise data must play a larger part of future marketing campaigns. Campaigns themselves must become data-driven events with moving targets and rolling conclusions based upon a prospect’s “cumulative timed intent.”

[easysms]