The Simplicity Advantage: Integration is Innovation

Oct 19, 2018


The convenience of mobile has redefined our lives as consumers. With personal assistants and connected applications we search, shop and communicate instantly and seamlessly. For organizations seeking to engage consumers on mobile and generate revenue from digital properties however, life isn’t so simple.

Building a thriving business on mobile is inherently complex. Technology is a blessing and a curse; it brings a solution adequate to the size of the task, but is also a catalyst for confusion, rather than convenience. But if organizations understand the root cause of this complexity, and discover the alternatives available, the simplicity that users enjoy on mobile, can be achieved and used as a competitive advantage. This blog is designed to assist with exactly that.

Today, there are over 4.5 billion consumers on mobile, and more big data available than ever before. But with privacy legislation such a GDPR enforceable by law, organizations must ensure all data used (first-party or third-party) is consented and compliant. Not a simple task to manage, and therein lies a modern complexity constant. Consented data is now a legal imperative, a deeply woven prerequisite to all of the following

Mind the data gap

Marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate the measurable commercial impact of their digital investments. Coca-Cola, one of the greatest marketing powerhouses ever to exist, recently highlighted this fact by replacing the CMO role with that of a CGO (Chief Growth Officer).

What’s this got to do with complexity? To grow and thrive on mobile, organizations need to both retain existing users, as well as discover and engage new consumers at scale (i.e. growth). But despite the volume of big data that exits, organizations only have legitimate access to data from users within their own apps, websites or ecosystems. This limits their potential to discover new audiences and revenue streams. Therefore, enlisting third-party data, and commissioning studies from companies such as Nielsen or ComScore, is often necessary. In isolation, nothing particularly complex about that. But, data alone is a dormant asset, its value lies in interpretation. This is where complexity starts to compound.

Barriers to Interpretation

Many point products are available to interpret data, and the average company invests in a minimum of 16 separate marketing technology platforms. For larger organizations, it could be as many as 98! When synthesizing data that is spread across multiple analytics platforms, competitive intelligence tools, and commissioned research studies – it’s very difficult to interpret all the data accurately. The siloed nature of technologies and data sets, drain time and resource and make it virtually impossible to yield anything other than sketchy insights littered with blind spots.

Half a map is better than no map at all though, right? Yes. But that map, those insights, still need to be activated in order to generate business results.

Activation Complication

What do we mean by ‘activation’? In this context it means transforming data and insights, into business results, automatically, at scale. For brands, this refers to effective user engagement, brand awareness and increased return on mobile marketing investments. For publishers, increased DAUs, MAUs and higher revenue from mobile properties.

Among the nearly 7000 marketing technology vendors  available today, hundreds are built to facilitate activation. But connecting insights to activation is complex, often requiring manual integration and optimization. Artificial intelligence should reduce this heavy lifting, but algorithms are seldom designed or optimized to activate the specific insights you feed them with. Not surprising therefore that only 22% of marketers feel they can successfully activate insights. This of course hinder business results. And if marketing dollars don’t yield the desired results, and mobile properties remain undervalued and underfilled – what’s a brand or publisher to do?

Retreat to the walled gardens!

Shackled and frustrated by the complexities of the wider ecosystem, organizations are drawn to the walled gardens. Huge volumes of first-party data, combined with insights and activation all in one place, make for an attractive alternative to the laborious management of multiple siloed point products. As a result, U.S organizations will invest  65% of their digital ad spend on Facebook, Google and Amazon in 2018.

But is that really a wise investment? Despite the quality of product, these giants exist to service their own corporate needs, not that of brands or publishers. The more money spent with them, and the more inventory they fill, the more data they collect and the more control they have. They end up knowing more about an organization’s’ users, than the organizations themselves! And instead of sharing this information with the marketers who fund it, it’s often used to launch competing products, services or sites.

Furthermore, despite the amount of hours users spend on these apps or sites, the walled gardens still only see about 50% of the entire mobile user journey. So the data that fuels their products and their AI, is intrinsically incomplete.

What’s the alternative?

Organizations looking to grow and thrive on mobile find themselves stuck between a rock and a hard place. Siloed and fragmented data, insights and activation technologies, drain time and limit results. The walled gardens with their opaque and biased practices, induce a new kind of business complexity.  On top of all that, the imperative of data validity and traceability, is adding another layer of unavoidable difficulty.  As the mobile ecosystem matures, organizations will demand a simpler solution to this endemic problem.

Ogury has designed a new category of solutions that anticipate and address these demands, to help organizations overcome the unavoidable challenges they currently face. Built from the inside out on first-party GDPR compliant mobile user journey data, Ogury provides the first fully integrated consent, data, insight and activation solution. Fueled by first-party data generated from consented signals, Ogury enables brands and publishers to understand the entire mobile user journey, across all apps and mobile websites, in full compliance with even the most stringent privacy laws. This data provides precious insights to inform strategy, and purpose-built AI technology automatically activates this insight to deliver business results.

Simplicity is attained by breaking down existing silos in which current tech platforms operate, and integrating consent, data, insights and activation technology in one place. AI removes unnecessary and tedious human labor, and simplicity becomes a competitive advantage. In a dynamic and often chaotic mobile market, integration is innovation.

To find out more about Ogury’s MJM Solutions, please contact