• by Murthy Nukala , July 7, 2010

Every online advertising campaign begins with a simple goal in mind: find the right target audience and engage them with the right experience. You probably have a pretty good idea who these potential customers are because they're the ones who already buy your product. All you need to do is find more of them.

If only it really was that simple. Identifying an online audience has never been more complex. The vast universe of millions of consumers is scattered across thousands of different publishers, making it seem impossible to find your customers in the fast-moving world of online media. To complicate matters, the average marketer's data about its audience members is also highly fragmented -- shattered into small, unrelated shards of data. These shards of data limit both a marketer's understanding of its own audience and overall marketing effectiveness.

Here is a simple framework for three major ways in which your audience data becomes fragmented:

1. Audience fragmentation across publishers and networks - There are tens of thousands of publishers accepting some kind of interactive advertising. Ad networks and exchanges try to help marketers simplify the online advertising process, but some estimate there are more than 300 different ad networks in business today. When a marketer works with a particular publisher, network or exchange, the behavioral data generated by a particular consumer cannot be leveraged by the marketer in other media outlets. So, the disconnected nature of online media leads to fragmentation of consumer data on a massive scale.
2. Audience Data fragmentation across channels - Marketers today often use point solutions for functions such as inventory acquisition, ad serving, dynamic creative composition and brand safety assurance - just on the ad-side. Consumers are spending an increasing amount of their online time accessing content via new channels including search, social media, and mobile devices. Since different systems are used to access consumers across these ad-side systems and channels, data is being further fragmented.
3. Experience fragmentation across systems - On the site-side, marketers engage with consumers using multiple systems -- content management systems, landing page systems, and CRM systems. These operational systems collect information in order to facilitate a particular portion of the consumer interaction. This data is rarely shared across the advertisers' systems. Even though these systems play a critical role in the customer interaction process, they serve to further compound the problem of consumer data fragmentation.

To date, most marketers have largely resigned themselves to the problem of audience data fragmentation. They accept the "fact" that it is not possible to leverage consumer data across publishers, channels, and their own systems, resulting in marketers "forgetting" much of what they've learned about a consumer from one interaction to the next. The result? Online marketing that is far less effective and relevant than it could be.

In order to advance the overall effectiveness of interactive advertising in a world that is becoming ever-more complex, the industry must leverage technology to address the fundamental challenge of audience fragmentation. One can imagine a world where a marketer can consistently manage information about its anonymous audience members across publishers, channels and systems, and utilize this data in real-time to improve each consumer's experience. Marketers who can coherently reassemble the pieces of their own online audience puzzle and then take action on that data will be rewarded with a clear picture of interactive advertising's true potential.