The new mandate to marketers is clear: Stay on top of technological change, or risk losing ground to nimble competitors. This new, independent research study by the Winterberry Group seeks to clarify the technology questions that plague marketers everywhere and bring to light how marketers can extract more value from their technology to implement true data-driven marketing strategies.
Integration leads to greater value
More than 60 percent of marketers said better integration of existing tools would help them derive greater value from data.
Complexity is the Norm
Enterprise marketers on average use more than 12 distinct toolsets to support data-driven marketing efforts. Nine percent regularly work with 31 or more tools.
Organizational siloes hinder integration
Within the typical marketing organization, five stakeholder groups — including digital, analytics, media-buying and direct marketing — utilize different tools.
Data and technology. Together, they’re upending the worlds of advertising and marketing.
No longer just the province of the direct marketer (and recognized as the linchpin of the burgeoning “programmatic marketing” practice), consumer data is growing to support programs that span virtually all digital and traditional media.
From afar, the new mandate to marketers is clear: Stay on top of this tide of technological change, or risk losing ground to more nimble competitors. Closer to the ground, though, today’s technology landscape is dauntingly complex. While the growing volume and velocity of addressable data challenge marketers to simply keep up the pace, supplier consolidation and the seemingly continuous emergence of disruptive new tools are changing the face of the industry around them—confronting marketers, publishers, agencies (and even technology companies themselves) with a series of stark strategic alternatives:
Do we build bespoke systems to address objectives that are specific to our business? Assemble customized “martech stacks” of neutral third-party tools? Or turn toward solutions that purport to be
integrated—the “Clouds” and “Suites” being aggressively marketed by their global parent companies—with an eye to managing complex programs through a single interface? Today, all around the world, enterprises are experimenting aggressively with permutations of all three approaches. While it’s still too early to proclaim any one a universal “best practice,” two clear truths have already emerged:
- When it comes to technology, no single “one-size-fits-all” solution can address every marketer’s need.
- And capitalizing on data’s vast inherent value requires more than just a casual assessment of those tools that power its utilization. Rather, it calls on users to rigorously map the roles and contributions of various potentially interconnected platforms—to become masters of the new domain of “data technology.”
This white paper seeks to clarify how marketers are reconciling those questions as they seek to advance their utilization of consumer data technology used to support advertising and marketing functions. Compiled through an intensive executive-level outreach effort, it will demonstrate that the embrace of data technology represents a transformative development for both marketers and enterprise technologists alike.