The New Digital Climate: AdTech and MarTech Join Forces

Marketing Technology


At Marketing Nation Summit in April, Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez announced a new product, Ad Bridge, which is centered around the idea that the world of paid media (AdTech) has now joined with the world of marketing technology (MarTech). The market is shifting and demanding this merging of technologies. Why? Because marketers are increasingly in need of tearing down the silos between paid media and engagement marketing that have traditionally been treated as separate.

Interestingly, the market is demanding that these technologies come together for a couple of reasons:

Reason 1: The Rise of Mobile

Traditional paid media has been driven by the targeting of ads using technology around the cookie and anonymous cookie tracking. Ever since 2012 there has been a vast tidal shift in the time spent on each marketing medium. The web is now mostly accessed through mobile. A recent Flurry analytics report showed that in Q1 2012, mobile minutes per day were only 109 and TV minutes per day were 168, but just 2.5 years later in Q3 2014, mobile minutes had catapulted to 177 while TV minutes remained at 168. Let’s face it—mobile is the primary channel now. Web and email access shows a similar shift with comScore reporting in July 2014 that smartphones and tablets are now accounting for 60% of all online traffic. In addition, a January 2015 Marketing Land survey found that two-thirds of emails are now opened and read on smartphones and tablets. The times they are a-changin’!

The key take-away here? Mobile does not support cookies, and as such, cookies and the anonymous tracking and targeting that many DMP/DSPs have employed in the past are rapidly changing.

Reason 2: The Shift towards More Personalized Engagement

Consumers are demanding a more personalized engagement with the brands they interact with. This demand has caused a shift for marketers away from anonymous tracking and towards more first-party relationships and first-party data. This is so that a marketer has a relationship with a consumer who has willingly opted in, and thus, the marketer can target the individual based on what they do, continuously over time, and everywhere they are. Marketing technology and engagement marketing have always had this wealth of first-party information available that marketers could use. When you bring this valuable first-party data together with paid media systems, a marketer can achieve some compelling results.

With that being said, let’s explore the major use cases that are enabled:

1. Customer Journey

Historically, marketing automation or engagement platforms have had only a partial view of the customer journey, and that was from when a consumer raised their hand and submitted their contact info. Once a form was submitted, engagement systems then were able to track all the different activities tied to that consumer. What was missing? All the steps that were taken prior to submitting a form and becoming known. The steps prior to becoming known are actions that the paid media systems (DMPs/DSPs) knew: they knew that you were among a group of people that saw a digital display ad or video ad that drove you to the landing page and you became known. Therefore, the combination of these systems has now allowed a marketer to have a much more complete view of their customer journey from impression through the lifecycle.

2. Retargeting

Retargeting simply means that if a consumer visits a site but does not complete the desired activity or action, you can then retarget them throughout the web to encourage them to come back to your site and reengage. This is a very common use case most marketers are now very familiar with. Marketo LaunchPoint parners such as Bizo (now LinkedIn Marketing) and AdRoll help primarily B2B marketers do retargeting; Google and major DMP/DSP LaunchPoint partners such as Turn, MediaMath, and Rocket Fuel help major B2B and B2C marketers as well.

3. Reactivation

Reactivation is the notion that you’ve had consumers express interest and become known in the past, but perhaps they didn’t complete the action desired, and you want to encourage them to come back and do so. Reactivation also encompasses the idea of consumers who were past purchasers, subscribers, etc, but who have since stopped buying or engaging or “gone dark” on your marketing efforts and you want to use paid media channels to encourage them to return and engage.

4. Look-a-Like Modeling

Look-a-like modeling is sort of a “phase two” of this collision between paid media technology and marketing technology. The concept of look-a-like modeling uses data within a marketing automation or engagement platform regarding who a company’s most engaged customers are. Marketers can then segment their databases into all different dimensions using these powerful tools. If a marketer can take these lists or segments of best customers and pass them over to the major paid media businesses (DMPs, DSPs, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc), then those companies can use their targeting technologies to identify look-a-like audiences to advertise to. Advertising to those who look similar to your best customers can help save tremendous costs in your paid media campaigns.

3 Day Blinds: A Case Study for the Record Books

Even though this AdTech and MarTech marriage is in its early days, there are forward-thinking marketers out there who have already seen incredible results. 3 Day Blinds, a customer of both Marketo and AdTech company Turn, recently shared some results from some particularly successful marketing programs. Combining data insights from both AdTech and MarTech helped 3 Day Blinds’ marketing team to more closely listen and respond to each of their customers, helping them to deliver more personalized, relevant ads to their customers and prospects. In doing this, they increased their click-through rate by a staggering 140%, reducing their cost per acquisition to only one-fifth of what they were originally paying to acquire an appointment. Incredible!

Modern marketers have to think about tearing down the silos between paid media and acquisition efforts and marketing and engagement efforts. These two functions and technologies need to work together to drive improved engagement with customers and prospects.

Check back with the Marketo blog this Friday, June 5th where I’ll dive deeper into the concept of reactivation.