Commentary

What 2017 Will Bring

by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, December 9, 2016

It's December, time when many of us are scrambling to finish up business for the year, make the rounds of industry holiday parties and start setting our minds on the year to come. What will 2017 bring to the world of media and marketing? Here are some thoughts:

Rise of enterprise tech in marketing. Enterprise software companies like Oracle, IBM and SAP, not just consulting firms, will establish themselves as clear usurpers to the former role of agencies. Not content to just provide software for marketing analytics and automation, they will directly compete in media activation following Adobe's pioneering step buying video ad platform TubeMogul.

Rise of STEM marketers. More in the marketing suite will have science, technology, engineering and math degrees, even the leaders. Data, empiricism and inquiry-based thinking are critical for marketing success, and those marketers trained to think, write and act with that kind of fluency will win — over those who can't.

The CRM becomes the new DMP. Most of the data management platforms today were built first and foremost to be cookie management machines. That worked well for the open Web, but the future of digital marketing, particularly cross-platform, will require more durable and more foundational identity graphs like name and address. That is the only way marketers will be able to truly leverage their activities and data across walled-garden environments like Google, Facebook — and, especially, linear TV advertising — and connect them to ultimate customer transactions. That kind of data today lives in companies’ customer relationship management systems. Expect to see those systems be retrofitted with DMP-like capabilities.

Programmatic fades from our lexicon. The word programmatic will lose even more luster as folks realize that it's a term all too often used to hide sins, not drive real value for marketers. The concept of programmatic advertising has always been a powerful one, but not always in its execution. Automated audience-based ad buying in real time, based on analytics delivered with addressability and real-time attribution, is the Holy Grail for so many. However, the term has been tainted in practice by surcharging, opaque trading desks moving cheap — and all too often, fraudulent — stuff fast, with a hard-to-follow audit trail. The Holy Grail will happen, but we’ll just call the solutions by their component parts: automation, analytics, audience-based.

What do you think 2017 will bring?

ad technology, dmp, media, programmatic

3 comments about "What 2017 Will Bring ".

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Joel Rubinson from Rubinson Partners, Inc., December 12, 2016 at 6:48 a.m.
My annual predictions blog gets extremely high views and shares...from cookies to unified IDs, from MMM to MTA, from funnels to journeys, from stand alone surveys to integrating research with DMPs, here ya go
http://blog.joelrubinson.net/2016/12/marketing-and-research-hot-topics-for-2016-and-6-priorities-for-2017/
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R.J. Lewis from e-Healthcare Solutions, LLC, December 12, 2016 at 9:34 a.m.

Dave,

Great predictions. The enterprise software guys are already creating quite the stir. Curious if you see a time where agencies/enterprise merge. While the enterprise guys are probably in a good position to "build" rather than buy, it seems the rapid acquisition of creative, relationship talents as well as customer accounts could eventually create M&A here.

Regarding the CRM becoming the new DMP - couldn't agree more. The biggest barrier here is privacy concerns and regulations. Do you think this changes under Trump? The larger concern candidly is society. Are we "ready" for this kind of privacy erosion and personalization? I battle with this question often. I'm not sure we are.

Dave Morgan from Simulmedia, December 12, 2016 at 11:49 a.m.

Thanks RJ. I do expect that the large enterprise tech folks will build out professional service capabilties i this area, startig with technology and data integration and following with strategy. Of course, they will also lean heavily on ccnsutling firms who they have worked with over the years, like McKinsey, Acdenture and others. Getting into creative services may not make as much sense to them, unless it is for focused on industrialized creative production, for example. I don't think that they want to be in unquantifable parts of the business.
On the rpivacy front relative to the DMP being ingested into the CRM, I think that we'll see next gernation developments from folks like Axiom and Experion and Neustar that will help pave the way here, as well as moves from Oracle and other enterpise tech. They all deal with private and proprietary information salefly all day long.