Forrester Research warns B2C marketers to be on the lookout for big changes in media buying in 2016.
As Luca Paderni, Forrester's vice president and research director serving B2C marketing professionals, told Real-Time Daily last week, one of Forrester’s biggest predictions for 2016 is the shift from content-based to audience-based media buying.
That means marketers will continue to buy ads against top-rated prime-time TV shows for broad reach, but they'll also try to target specific audience profiles based on data gleaned from category purchase behavior, demographics and more.
With that in mind, a second report from Forrester called "Personal At Last For B2C Marketers" stressed that programmatic media will have a big moment next year.
“Advertisers can enjoy more control in the planning of campaigns, to really optimize them,” Paderni said. “The advantage of programmatic is its flexibility.”
Easier access to insights and improved tech will change media buying, the report predicts. And in turn, advances in tech and measurement will extend the value of customer insights beyond media buying and even beyond marketing departments, Paderni said.
He added that there will be a shift: marketers will focus on collecting smart data instead of Big Data, and they’ll focus on touchpoints that can drive business outcomes.
“It’s going to be quite difficult for marketers to adapt,” Paderni said, adding that brands will have to be relevant to consumers in a specific context. “Less is more is a new mantra, and that’s counter to marketing in the last 50 years,” he said.
The report also maintains that social marketers will prioritize Instagram, Vine or their own branded communities instead of Facebook to build deep connections with customers, and more media buying agencies will bring in creative talent -- or partner with creative agencies to expand their capabilities.
How come these Forrester guys are still allowed to predict anything? And why does the media still go along for the ride?
The practice of collecting ("big," messy, real-time) data is distinct from understanding, categorizing/classifying and leveraging into behavior-effecting leading indicators. Thus, data are not inherently smart or dump, though, certain connected devices / sensors may produce data of different quality or value--is what one chooses to keep vs. throw away (extract signal-from-noise) that creates that actionable intelligence. At the end of the day, it's always "smart people" who get to synthesize business knowledge (strategy), logic (expert system rules) and math (predictive models) to drive process optimization and marketing impact...