One of the most urgent questions that clients,
agencies, and advertisers are asking is, "How do we adapt our organization for changes in the performance marketing landscape -- particularly the convergence of search, social, and display?"
It's a tough question. Invariably, innovations in technology and media will happen faster than most organizations can adapt to. This creates an opportunity for the fleet of
foot. The winners in either search, social, or display will be those who manage all holistically. Budgets and goals should be set across all performance marketing channels and
search, display, and social publishers should be optimized together. To accomplish this you need to have a holistic approach based on performance, innovation, and people (PIP).
Performance
The most obvious element that binds search, social and display media is that all can be bought on biddable auctions. The growth of paid search was a
precursor to the creation and growth of cross-channel attribution, data exchanges and demand-side platforms. These advances have fundamentally changed performance-based digital marketing.
Advertisers now have better transparency, efficiency, and accountability for their online media campaigns than ever before. Just as important, advertisers can know all the customer interactions
with their media that lead to purchases at every step of the decision funnel. As search and display media merge and marketers begin to understand how the two channels interact they can attribute
and manage digital spend accordingly. Search marketing, display marketing, and social media experts now have one common goal: performance. Over the next year we will see the growth of
centralized "biddable media" departments.
Innovation
Many advertisers, agencies, and technology providers face their biggest challenge in recent years: how to
innovate and keep pace with the ever-changing digital landscape. Innovation has to be controlled and led carefully by technical, product, and market specialists. You should not lose your focus
on your core competencies, but if you don't innovate then your company will probably face extinction. Going into 2011, it is vital that marketers embrace innovation and the new technologies that help
them measure, attribute, and optimize performance media spend. You should be focused on how you incorporate, pitch, and present these technologies to clients. Innovation does not only mean technology,
but also processes and ... people.
People
Technology is only as good as the people that use it. A key challenge for advertisers, in-house teams, and agencies is
how to use and leverage talent across the organization. Training your team on new performance marketing concepts and technologies is essential. The marketplace is getting more complex, not less.
Just as important is what service technology platforms offer clients/users and agencies to enable them to understand the products, market, and technology around them. Optimizing people is just
as important as optimizing performance media. The search marketer can help display and exchange specialists under the concepts of auction-based media. Vice versa,
display people can help search specialists with dynamic creative and understanding of networks and exchanges.
Together, we may just see the rise of the "biddable media" department.