Are Your Brand Audiences Fragmenting along with the Rest of Marketing?
Marketing has never been so fragmented (see below). The unique combinations of paths that advertisers now need to take to talk with consumers is staggering and not sustainable. Surely, data and AI will help mitigate this, but will that require advertisers to give up control and transparency of their audience interactions? I would love to say ‘continue reading below for three easy solutions’, but no. What I can offer, and the purpose of this blog post, are thoughts on how to avoid fragmenting your audience strategies as the marketing ecosystem around you continues to fragment.
Thousands of unique marketing execution combinations
Diverse media channels (Linear TV, CTV, Commerce Media, Mobile Video, Display, Search, App, OOH, DOOH, etc.)
Walled publisher and social gardens (Meta, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc.)
Walled retailer media (Amazon, Walmart, Target, Kroger, etc.)
Actual scope of retailer marketing (merchandising, TPRs, circulars, in-store displays, shopper marketing, in-store media, e-comm media, sponsored search, sponsored ads, off-site retailer ads, etc.)
Targeting Methods (Cookies, Alternative Ids, IP, MAID, HEM, geography, context, browser curated cohorts, etc.)
Data Clean Rooms (publishers, retailers, agencies, 3rd party data providers, etc.)
Consumer privacy laws (CCPA, GDPR, and dozens of varying state laws)
The problem for brand advertisers is that they are mirroring this fragmentation inside their marketing and advertising operations. Over time, many brands end up with separate teams and processes for each major retailer, each major media company, each clean room, each media channel, etc. And because each of these variants has their own operating processes, data definitions, targeting methods, privacy rules, etc., many advertiser teams end up going rogue with one-offs because they cannot delay that campaign, cannot annoy that retailer, cannot forgo that media channel, etc. Before they know it, they have tweaked and customized their ideals so much that they are now ten steps removed from the relevant audience segments they wanted to reach and consistently influence across all their marketing channels. Is that you? Not sure, but do any of the below symptoms sound familiar?
Signs you may be fragmenting your brand audiences
Defaulting to the lowest common denominator audience definitions to ease cross media channel operations
Reverting to universal geo-demographic audience targeting despite behavioral targeting being available
Generalizing your ad message to fit a single audience rather than talking uniquely to the distinct sub-segments within
Not proactively aligning retailer in-store and online marketing activities and shopper messaging
Eliminating performing media channels and publishers just because you cannot handle the complexity
Delaying new retail media rollouts until processes and best practices can scale
So….what can advertisers do about this? Focus more on maintaining the foundational basics. The most important elements of marketing have not fragmented. Brands still have products with unique features and consumers with unique needs. Brands cannot let the chaos surrounding them harm their ability to connect the two. Make a conscious choice to improve, maintain, and monitor those vital product-to-consumer interactions. Invest to ensure the sub-set of society being carved out to talk with is actually getting the specific message you intended before things strayed off course on the road to activation. That said, you must proactively invest in the tools and processes to help your fragmented marketing teams avoid the temptations that compromise your ideals.
There are many AI, software, and data aggregation solutions out there that promise to help harmonize marketing fragmentation. I work with some. None of them, however, eliminate the need for brands to overtly commit to deeply knowing their audiences and what best influences them. This cannot be outsourced. This knowledge spans all marketing mix channels and consumer touchpoints and should be centralized. Give all marketing channels the ability to leverage and contribute to that audience knowledge, and give them capabilities to transform that knowledge as minimally as possible to meet their unique channel’s activation requirements. I have lots more to say on this, but it’s too much for this blog post to cover. Instead, I summarized some key thoughts below.
Audience fragmentation protection strategies
Overtly audit and monitor the actual audiences and corresponding messages being activated to assess how fragmented your audience interactions are
Invest in a single repository with your audience segments and knowledge about them, focusing on what influences them as humans, independent of marketing platform dynamics
Establish enterprise-wide data taxonomies to help understand, categorize, and link your audiences, sub-segments, products, category, competitors, media content, time frame, context, etc.
Build or license access to an identity spine that actively maintains key addressable ids to improve digital activation scale, coverage, and efficiency (e.g. DSP cookies, alternative ids, MAIDs, IP addresses, HEMs, etc.)
Proactively model and score audiences between addressable and non-addressable targeting methods like geographies, media context, browser interest/topic cohorts, dayparts, moments, etc.
Map your audience taxonomies and related data to key industry, retailer, and media taxonomies to help harmonize and streamline the inputs and outputs into your audience repository
Orchestrate all audience segment activations and corresponding messages from this centralized source of truth to minimize straying from your core audience strategies
Point your AI to this audience knowledge and connecting taxonomies to leverage human curated learning and boost model result relevancy and confidence
Reverse the cross-platform mapping used to activate audiences across asymmetric platforms to transform learnings back into the repository for continued refinement (yes, I know for many providers make this hard)
I know, easier said than done. Nothing worth doing is. DM if you want to benefit from my successes and learn from my failures working across all these marketing channels.