• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, November 4, 2016

Real-time marketing sounds so simple. But it’s not that easy to execute without the right tools/technologies, strategies, experts, and internal alignment in place.

All marketers are looking to use data to increase the level of personalization and inform their marketing strategies in real time. But there are pain points.

RTBlog spoke recently to Assaf Henkin, SVP of brand intelligence solutions at Amobee, a martech company that provides data and ad solutions across channels for brands, agencies, and publishers.

A major pain point is that first-party data, the data that most marketers typically have, only goes so far. In addition, many of the data sources that used to be more “available” are becoming more protected -- or, as Henkin put it, “walled-gardenish.” And we know which companies he’s referring to here. Google and Facebook are the two largest. “Even Twitter has become more protective of its data. You can’t really access their data as easily as you used to,” he said. And even when marketers throw large amounts of money at so-called walled gardens, the data they get remains limited.

So the question becomes: Where does a marketer get more data? Of course many marketers are building their own data management platforms (DMPs), along with publishers. Some are forging partnerships and other arrangements to gain access to third-party data. And once there is a marriage of first- and third-party data, the work of integrating the data and extracting what’s of most value is a key challenge.

Another pain point: There are limitations to third-party data. For example, Henkin said a marketer can buy an audience, like IT decision-makers, or moms, etc., “but what happens when your competitors are all buying the same third-party segment, hitting the same cookie and unique ID? The duplication becomes a waste, and there is diminishing value for third-party data,” he explained. Marketers and their agencies need to invest more to create, find, or work with parties that can help them develop new data sources. No doubt, he’s referring to companies like Amobee.

Henkin said one of the differentiators of his company’s “brand intelligence platform” it that it fuses several data sources and creates new ones. The approach helps marketers gain a new way to understand their target customers and market. It also enables more reach. “We can expose marketers to additional audience groups that they wouldn’t otherwise be aware of. We enable them to understand  how sentiment works and other attributes—this enables improved targeting,” he said.

For a financial services client that was looking to get more people to subscribe to its investment service, Amobee got the brand to understand its audience in a more granular way beyond traditional third-party data sources that help generate audience segments. Amobee created segments defined by specific interests that investors have -- say, for example, IPOs or the S&P 500. It then developed an index of “trigger topics” that demonstrated how those targets’ interests ebb and flow over time.

“When interest peaks, it correlates with greater interest in financial products and services, and that means there’s an opportunity to run a campaign,” Henkin said. “We were able to tell the client when the most appropriate times are for them to advertiser, no matter the channel.”

The end result: by triggering media based on increases and decreases in targets' content consumption, the marketer could take advantage of the real-time mindset of customers to use media more efficiently and effectively.