DataXu is pleased to be a sponsor of the Digital Marketing 2.0 Community. Living in an era of ubiquitous digital devices is changing consumer behavior and, in turn, driving a paradigm shift in marketing. CMOs unanimously cite that they are underprepared to handle the data deluge generated by consumer interaction with digital media, and are uncertain what tools, technologies, partners and resources they will need to develop new strategies for interpreting the data and making real-time business decisions based on the insights it provides.

In response, we decided to launch and support an industry-wide conversation, backed by a research study, on how companies can tap into the power of the customer intelligence derived from a fully-digital world. We hope that you will share your opinions and thoughts, and become an active proponent of education, interaction, and collaboration with your peers. We look forward to seeing and participating in productive discussions, dialogues and debates.

Visit: http://www.digitalmarketing2.com/

During the first half of February, DataXu and our partners (MoPub, Celtra, and Collider) hosted three panel events across the country. We discussed the value of exchange traded media to mobile advertisers and postulated about the future of mobile advertising in general. These discussions featured panelists from all parts of the mobile ecosystem – the points of view were diverse; however, a few themes bubbled up.

#1 We’ve got an attribution situation. Marketing efforts are evaluated on their impact against key performance indicators established by their organization.  In most channels, marketers have gotten very good at attributing impact back to these efforts. Mobile is an outlier. Advertisers are used to connecting the dots in display and search – but with the variety of platforms and nuances in app vs. mobile web, advertisers are looking for a crisp solution which will allow them to compare performance in mobile against performance in other channels.

#2 “Buying mobile media is still like the wild wild west”…direct quote from our Chicago panel. The questions are, who will be the driver of standards in mobile and what will they be? This sentiment likely will resonate, not just with buyers, but also with sellers (thought leaders looking to solve attribution, audience data, and other challenges in mobile because standards are needed here too).

#3 Audience data is on the wish list…in a big way and the mobile ecosystem is working hard to make this a reality for advertisers. It sounds like the trick will be moving beyond the cookie to an identification solution that’s scalable, works in the app space and mobile web, and works across operating systems. Thinking more broadly, any discussion about audience over the last 10 days inevitably leads to a debate about identifying audiences across devices (mobile and other) in a way that will enable advertisers to target their key segments consistently on any device. This leads us to our next theme…

#4 Mobile convergence with display vs. mobile as a unique channel. So there’s some contradiction here. Across our panels, speakers noted that mobile is increasingly going to be regarded as an integrated piece of a digital marketing strategy. Spurring this hypothesis are the concurrent use of multiple screens by consumers and the fact that mobile web has become the primary connection for a sizable sub-set of the population. On the flip side, speakers also urged us to embrace what’s unique about mobile – the fact that it’s on the go and not tied down, the implied intent of users engaging on these devices, the opportunity to be locally relevant – and not to try to put mobile into a display box.

#5 Advertisers are getting better at mobile measurement. This relates to theme #4. Commentary from our panels indicated that advertisers are seeing variances in content engagement on mobile devices, as compared to desktop web. For example, trends show lower video completion rates in mobile but greater engagement with the ads.  What do these metrics mean and how should brands interpret them? Ultimately, the take-away is to make sure that your metrics are relevant to what you want your consumers to get out of your mobile executions.

Bonus: It’s important to be a smart and educated consumer. Panelists and attendees made this point quite clear. Before making buying, selling, measuring, concepting creative, targeting or making any other kind of decision about your mobile strategy, do your homework. Understand the vendors you select and ask about their experience in the channel. Look at how your consumers behave in mobile – if not your consumers, consumers like you consumers – so you can enter your decision-making process with some context. Be aware of consumer privacy and the source of any data used in mobile efforts. Finally, use common sense!

We know that video is huge on mobile devices, especially in the entertainment category.  It’s not very surprising that 58% of smartphone users and 67% of iPad users have watched movie trailers on their devices.  When it comes to promoting a movie, the decision to incorporate mobile into your marketing mix is pretty obvious.  More obvious still, iPad users have watched more movie trailers than smartphone users.  Given that tablets have bigger screens, it makes sense.

With that said, determining where to focus your media efforts in mobile should seem pretty clear, right?  Well, not always – but, common sense can be a great indicator to get started.

A global financial services company came to DataXu with the insight that its consumers are highly mobile and asked for help activating a strategy to capitalize on this new channel of communication to drive incremental account activations.  The goal was to convert consumers through a multi-step form, complete with personal banking information and social security numbers.  A challenging undertaking for any advertising channel, let alone mobile.  What device do you think performed better?  Hint: your common sense should help.  The Case Study

Excerpt:

“The new reality: ubiquitous mobile devices have forever changed consumer behavior, and the data from consumer interactions with these devices has forever changed marketing. Given the challenges and opportunities this data deluge presents to brands, I often wonder what agencies are doing to stay on the edge of innovation and use this data to their clients’ advantage? I recently sat down with Alex Andreyev, strategic investments supervisor at Neo@Ogilvy, to discuss the strides his agency has been making in mobile advertising, and what’s next on the horizon as they lead the trend of the evolution of agencies in a data-driven world.

Mike Baker: Why is Neo@Ogilvy pursuing a mobile demand-side platform (DSP) strategy as opposed to working with mobile ad networks?

Alex Andreyev: At Neo, we are always focused on new opportunities to drive value and performance for our clients; it’s in our DNA. We want to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by the continued convergence of media, data, and technology to deliver on our clients’ objectives. Demand-side platforms, while not new for display, are relatively new for mobile. They deliver high value that extends beyond buying predetermined audiences to deliver real-time insights and customer intelligence that inform the media plan for optimal effectiveness and efficiencies. By reaching customers wherever they are, knowing their interests, and making the right offers, we can ultimately amplify our clients’ returns.”

According to the GSMA, the number of mobile connected devices will double from 6 billion in 2011 to 12 billion by 2020. Are you ready to take full advantage of this digital juggernaut?  Here are five tips on how you can get the most out of your mobile advertising investments.

1. Look beyond click-through rates when evaluating mobile campaigns.

If you think mobile is just for direct response campaigns, you may be trapped in 2006. Mobile can drive tremendous brand engagement – there’s no reason to evaluate mobile campaign performance through the vantage point of CTR. Over the course of a year, we ran three mobile campaigns for a large enterprise software company through their digital agency. The primary objective for each campaign was to drive various user engagements on the brand’s mobile site (e.g. case study views, click-to-call, send to a friend, Facebook likes, etc.) All three of the mobile campaigns were a tremendous success, driving the largest volume of cost-effective conversions of all digital efforts.

2. Be open to testing…and testing, and testing.

Don’t pigeonhole your campaigns into narrow audiences or device types. Think your campaign will perform best on tablets as opposed to feature phones? That’s fine. Test performance on tablets, but don’t abandon feature phones. Campaign performance is, in many cases, situational. One device does not work universally better than another.  And while you may be convinced that your campaign will resonate with a certain segment, you should still experiment with targeting tactics, and choose a vendor that employs prospecting techniques to identify new, potentially lucrative audiences (“lookalikes”).  Our system can figure out which audiences are really engaging with your campaign, and the answers might surprise you. The most successful brands are where they are because they’re not afraid to innovate, iterate, and learn.

3. Leave all options on the table.

We often recommend that our clients pixel every page of their site. It lets us determine which of our mobile campaigns led to an outcome (e.g., campaign X drove 50 “find a dealer” actions) and helps the client learn what elements are working best.  It also gives us the freedom to optimize against pretty much any metric you choose – content downloads, click-to-calls, app downloads, Facebook likes, etc. Regardless of whether we set up a campaign to optimize off clicks or site actions, our system looks at the same set of criteria to determine which impressions are more or less valuable. We’ve seen campaigns that have a lot of targeting parameters layered on top, and they pigeon-hole themselves into limited distribution.

4. Realize that one size doesn’t fit all.

Display performance doesn’t necessarily translate to mobile performance. We all know that running display creatives in mobile campaigns is a bad bet due to disparities in screen size, but trying to mimic display tactics in mobile isn’t really going to cut it either.  It’s the same reason we ask clients to pixel their entire mobile sites – options are everything.  Sophisticated mobile DSPs have algorithms that work continuously in real time to find new audiences receptive to your brand, so why limit yourself with a single targeting parameter or creative concept?  Let the platform decide what works best. It will show you where your ads are performing best and with whom, and allocate your spend to maximize efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Incorporate mobile as part of a larger campaign strategy.

Mobile doesn’t have to be a standalone channel; we encourage our customers to use mobile as part of a multichannel marketing approach to reach audiences with whom their brands and their messaging resonate. It should be a dedicated part of your integrated marketing mix.  Mobile advertising efforts can tie in seamlessly with campaigns running across other marketing channels, digital or not – QR codes in print ads or billboards to let users download apps or drive them to a WAP site; TV commercials promoting SMS text messaging to allow users to enter a contest, and more.  Remember, mobile is no longer just a supplement to display advertising.  It’s an important vehicle for driving brand engagement. Any digital campaign can benefit from the value that mobile provides.

A version of this article also appeared in MediaPost on January 31, 2012: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/166826/5-tips-for-mobile-advertising-success.html

At the DataXu Mobile Anniversary Tour Stop #2, San Francisco, panelists’ and event-goers’ commentary raised a few eyebrows as well as sparked a few interesting questions that we’re still chewing on…

#1 In app news, Facebook mobile adoption is up year-over-year and Flurry data shows that in-app activity is growing at an extremely fast pace. On the mobile web side, Google is rolling out Chrome to Android devices. So the debate rages on: how will the mobile content consumption experience evolve? Will we see a permanent shift toward apps or will the mobile Web prevail as the dominant way to access content?

#2 As an ecosystem – the tech side, the supply side, the demand side – we are struggling with attribution in mobile. What does this mean for brands making decisions about marketing spend and how they’re viewing mobile? Do they assess mobile as a driver of conversion or just a contributor?

#3 Hyperlocal, strategically. If as an industry we could scale hyperlocal data in mobile, how would consumers behave? The top-of-mind question seems to be “will consumers be freaked out?” The more important question may be, “in what scenario will consumers actually find value and respond?”

Maybe we’ll find our answers at tonight’s Mobile panel event in Chicago!

By Whitney Jones

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases.

Brands are leveraging machine learning, via powerful technology platforms, to use consumers’ behavior to customize an individual consumer’s experience. As a result, consumers are presented with better recommendations, more relevant information, and more individualized content.

Here are some examples…

@Walmartlabs, a technical division of the country’s largest retailer, is chartered with finding and building upon the cross-section of consumer behavior in social and mobile media and retail – their keystone is what’s being called the “Social Genome.” @WalmartLabs is using machine learning to constantly analyze consumer generated social media signals – feeding the genome.  In turn, Walmart becomes better able to match consumers to products, and position products to consumers, in their advertising.

Are you planning a trip, making a reservation, looking for your next book? Hunch.com uses information you provide, your social activity, social activity of your friends, and social activity of those like you to generate individualized recommendations. How is this possible? Hunch aggregates all of these data points, uses your social graph to connect them, identifies your characteristics, and then taps into similar, ever-growing, graphs to find relevant information for you – that’s the power of machine learning.

Artificial Intelligence, real relationships. Companies like Intro Analytics, out of the UK, are applying machine learning to the wild world of online dating with algorithms that fuse machine learning and psychology. The popular online dating site eHarmony is on the same page and uses machine learning to match its users, and apparently to great success. According to its website, eHarmony is responsible for almost 5% of marriages in the US.

Here’s the common theme: machine learning supports relevant, individualized experiences. This is because it’s dynamic. Machine learning goes beyond even the most sophisticated rules-based tools to leverage data in a way that’s unique and evolves with consumers.

We all know a picture is worth a thousand words, so check out a photo of Wednesday’s event!

The digital marketing industry is fond terms like “actionable analytics” or “addressable analytics” – superior tools that give you deeper insights so you can make better decisions and look smart.  What’s not to like?  Good reports are essential, but they are usually a waypoint to what you really care about: using more data to get better results faster than your competition.

DataXu technology represents the next generation of data-driven decisioning, designed to convert data into insight into action continuously.  We call this Active Analytics™ because it goes beyond passive reporting, and actually executes millions of decisions on behalf of a user.  It can analyze more data and adjust more quickly than even the best “actionable analytics.”

Reporting, which is usually what is meant by analytics, is fundamentally a passive activity, even on its best day when the reports are “actionable.”  They are passive because they are show a reader what happened in the past, and leave the onus of the decision and action on the reader.  Good reports are “actionable,” and help a reader make a decision more quickly.  But the reader still has to make a decision, pick up the phone, renegotiate a deal, push a button, shift budget, etc. to execute the action.  This is an old paradigm that fails to thrive in the era of Big Data and micro-second transactions.

Why can’t more technology platforms do this?  You need an integrated Big Data stack that can not only process and report on your data, but can also transact programmatically.  It turns out this is pretty hard to build, but it will define the future of Big Data technology, even well beyond digital marketing.

By Aaron Kechley, VP of Products

Check out this episode of “Innovation Hub” with Kara Miller on WGBH Radio featuring Mike Baker and three other experts discussing the future of advertising: