• by Mark Kopera , January 21, 2016

Effective marketing engagement is no longer about reaching a mass audience via a single touchpoint with a one-ad-fits-all experience. While it’s still largely the case that all TV viewers of, say, a nationally broadcast Sunday football game will see the same beer ad, a large segment of that viewership is now watching it in non-traditional ways.

Many viewers are watching the game on TV. Others are watching on alternative screens—smartphone or tablet. Some are consuming several games at once while following commentary via Twitter/Facebook. Many are watching a simulcast on their computer and surfing other sites during timeouts and commercials.

New ways of consuming media present challenges, but also distinct opportunities for savvy marketers. Every device, app, social network, and publisher is another marketing opportunity—a chance to collect data on individuals, traffic volumes, engagements, and a variety of key performance indicators. Challenges include, how do marketers know where they will achieve optimum ROI and deliver the brand experience most likely to resonate with a key prospect? How can marketers not only understand the unprecedented volume of data coming from these more democratic consumption habits but also make it usable in real time?

The volume of data available is overwhelming, but marketers can significantly reduce campaign guesswork with the help of automated audience profiling that finds patterns within data generated through user interactions, both online and offline. This task is hardly a human one. Enter the data management platform (DMP).

A DMP enables marketers to harness and maximize the value of data collected vis-a-vis their customers making each consumer’s journey an individual, personalized experience. It’s a central marketing hub that ingests and integrates data generated from all marketing activities a brand executes from existing sales, marketing databases, to data from websites, social platforms, and loyalty programs. With a DMP, the marketer’s data—or first-party data—can be enriched further by blending in third-party data from reliable sources like Nielsen and comScore, resulting in a comprehensive picture of each customer’s profile and real insight on the best way to influence other customers with similar profiles.

DMPs do the heavy lifting of data analysis and, in real time, turn big data into valuable, actionable insight. The DMP removes inefficiencies resulting from a siloed view of data from one channel to the next so marketers can employ a fully cross-device, people-based strategy. It helps marketers identify the people behind the screens and link their previously siloed profiles to control the frequency, accuracy, and relevancy of messaging across devices and attribute the conversion, no matter which device it happens on.

For example, a user clicks on a travel brand’s prospecting banner for a particular product. Arriving at the travel website, they are shown product-related content. The user leaves the website and returns later because they were shown hyper-relevant messaging via search marketing based on their previous engagement. 

Upon re-entering the travel site, the user exhibits more buying signals: they register but still don’t make a purchase. But because they've registered, they're no longer an anonymous profile, they're an authenticated user with relevant CRM attributes and addressable data held by the marketer. Richer audience data and additional marketing channels such as Programmatic TV, email, and direct mail are now available to assist in getting this particular consumer converted. 

Marketers with large CRM data sets and a user base authenticated across a wide variety of devices can leverage such data to engage with their customers across all of their devices. With machine learning and data mining techniques that analyze signals including frequency of device usage, location, IP address, web content and app usage behavior, and time of day, a DMP helps marketers compile a single, anonymous consumer profile to enrich the understanding of device ownership and make well-defined consumer connections. With unified profiles, DMPs can send instructions to display, site, email, SMS, call center, and chat, real time. Marketers can set triggers to deliver personalized messages that guide prospects down the marketing funnel more effectively.

When leveraging a machine learning-based artificial intelligence (AI) platform, the more data available in the DMP, the better – because the AI is able to learn and understand the consumer that much better. DMPs are the place to collate and learn from data. Coupled with AI, it’s the place where machine learning can turn into human insights for ultimate marketing ROI. In a world where the possibilities to engage with consumers are only increasing, state-of-the-art marketing means a DMP and AI to unlock the true potential of consumer data.