Gartner cites recessionary fears, inflation and a talent gap as stoking concerns in the enterprise that have knock-on effects on marketing and marketing technology investments. Perhaps unexpectedly, although media allocation is flat, spending on digital channels actually showed a slight decline.

The state of martech spend. The bad news for the martech space is that no less than 75% of CMOs feel under pressure from other parts of the enterprise to cut their technology spending. The consolation is that 63% plan to resist the pressure, to some degree at least, and grow their martech spending. But almost one quarter, 23%, do expect to make cuts.

CMOs do propose to increase social advertising spend, but among the categories likely to take a hit are search advertising, SEO and digital OOH.

It’s necessary to “make a clear value case for martech investment,” said Ewan McIntyre, chief of research for the Gartner for Marketers Practice, presenting the survey’s findings. He also said, using the analogy of a voyage, that what was needed was “not a bigger boat, but a more efficient boat.”

Dig deeper: Digital ad spend growth drops to 7.8% this year

Catalytic marketing. His comments reflected the prominent theme of the Gartner keynote delivered by Lizzy Foo Kune, VP analyst and Carlos Guerrero, VP advisory in the Gartner Marketing Practice. They insisted that, despite pressures to realize growth in an uncertain environment, CMOs should not take the familiar route of increasing activity and taking on more projects.

They also questioned the value of “customer obsession.” “Customer obsession goes too far,” said Guerrero, “to unprofitable extremes that customers find intrusive.” Rather than trying to meet customers in every conceivable channel, leveraging customer data to deliver countless relevant messages, the keynote speakers introduced the concept of “catalytic marketing.” Gartner data shows, they said, that more important than quantity of engagement are experiences that bring about some change in the customer.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey

In essence, catalytic marketing is not about “more.” “Progressive CMOs are breaking free from the cycle of more by embracing catalytic marketing and, in the process, shifting from growing marketing’s scope to growing marketing’s success,” said Guerrero.

Why we care. The pressures on marketing and martech investment are clearly real. It’s an environment that demands efficiency and demonstrable ROI. The catalytic marketing concept needs to be fleshed out (an example they cited was L’Oreal’s Skin Genius experience); that’s the positive part of the Gartner message.

The part that might be perceived as negative is the sense that attempting to develop a 360 degree view of the customer and apply it to engagement on countless channels, might be counter-productive, despite everything we’ve heard over the past few years.

About the survey. 410 CMOs and marketing leaders were surveyed in March and April 2023. Respondents were based in North America and Europe, representing various industries and company sizes, with most reporting annual revenue exceeding $1 billion.

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That was the focus of a panel at The MarTech Conference, here are some of the takeaways from that discussion.

AI requires human supervision

As AI evolves, capabilities will expand. Can AI take over a specific business function and run it unaided? Not yet, according to Ricky Ray Butler, CEO of BENlabs, which uses AI to place brands’ products in entertainment and influencer content.

Artificial general intelligence or AGI is the kind of technology that is completely automated, and that’s simply not available yet.

“There is still human supervision [required] when it comes to data inputs or [telling the AI] what the purpose is to have successful outcomes,” said Butler.

“What AI really brings to the table is when it comes to the feedback loop,” he said. “It can structure data and a massive amount of data in a way that the human mind can’t even comprehend or compute. And it can do that at a scale where it can look at millions and millions of videos and monitor, prioritize and then also…make predictions with successful outcomes or or potentially unsuccessful outcomes. We are literally building a brain when we’re leveraging this type of technology to do what the human mind does, but to be able to do it even better and even more accurately.”

Dig deeper: A beginner’s guide to artificial intelligence

Generative AI writing tools need writers

Generative AI writing tools position themselves as writing assistants, not writers, said Anita Brearton, CEO of marketing technology management platform CabinetM.

“[These tools] describe their value prop as productivity,” she said. “They can help you write faster, they can improve SEO in fact.”

They can also help writers get started when all they’re staring at is a blank page. “They’re good for refining texts and creating some A/B versions of texts,” Brearton said.

Generative AI continues to improve in order to help creatives make text-based and visual content.

“I think we’re entering a very disruptive phase for creativity for designers, illustrators, video producers and writers,” said Paul Roetzer, CEO of the Marketing AI Institute 

A marketer’s point of view is more important than ever

As AI gets adopted for more marketing functions, marketers using these tools are needed to guide the technology and point it toward specific marketing objectives.

“The issue right now is the AI doesn’t have your knowledge of your product, it doesn’t have a knowledge of your customers, it doesn’t have knowledge about the internal politics of your company,” said Pam Didner, VP of marketing for consultancy Relentless Pursuit. “[AI doesn’t] have knowledge about even the road map that you are going to produce for your company. So AI can write very well, but you still need to add your own point of view. That’s where a human comes into play.”

Leaders need to know about AI when hiring

When AI is adopted by organizations, leadership needs to know how work has changed so they make the right hires.

“ChatGPT woke everyone up to AI, so we’re all testing the tools,” said Roetzer. “There’s pressure on CMOs and CEOs from boards and investors to figure out AI. Everybody needs to have a plan, and you have a whole bunch of leaders who don’t understand the underlying technology that now have to make decisions around staffing.”

He added, “We need to rapidly accelerate the comprehension of what AI is and what it’s capable of doing, what its limitations are. But, also [we need] to come to grips with where it’s going.”

Register and watch The MarTech Conference here.

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“If you are in a decision-making role you are probably tasked with at least evaluating whether this is a technology that you need to pay attention to,” said Milicevic. “And if you’re a practitioner, you very likely have to come up to speed on how to use it and on whether it’s relevant to your company.”

What is a DCR?

“It’s a technology that creates a secure, collaborative environment where two or more parties can use data for specific, mutually agreed upon purposes while eliminating exposure of that data to other parties,” said Milicevic, citing the IAB.

Why use a DCR?

“The key innovation here is how potentially sensitive customer data sets are handled,” Milicevic explained. “[Marketers] simply need a better, more secure environment to collaborate with potentially sensitive data sets — first-party data sets in particular.”

First-party data is becoming increasingly scarce with the introduction of privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, as well as the phasing out of third party cookies by Google and other privacy actions by major tech companies along the lines of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) program.

Dig deeper: How companies are leveraging data clean rooms as cookies vanish

Who uses DCRs?

DCRs can be used by brands, agencies and publishers. The catch is that these organizations should already have a high level of data maturity — they’ve made prior investments in data technology and have substantial teams to work with the technology. This means that right now the technology favors larger companies.

“Process cost and maturity are two significant gating factors that currently put data clean rooms as a super-premium or ‘luxury’ solution,” Milicevic said.

How much does it cost to use a DCR?

Two-thirds of DCR users have spent a minimum of $200,000 on the technology, and a quarter of those surveyed by the IAB have spent over $500,000, according to Milicevic.

The annual cost can go up over $2 million annually when adding in privacy protection tools and other technology that makes the DCR usable.

What are current and emerging use cases for DCRs?

Current uses for DCRs include

• Data privacy compliance;
• Data anonymization;
• Data cleansing and normalization and
• Data transformation and enrichment.

Emerging use cases include:

• Attribution;
• ROI measurement and modeling;
• Mixed media modeling and
• Predictive analytics.

“In addition to privacy safety and the ability to combine first-party data sets is…being able to do very advanced analytics in a much easier way,” said Milicevic. “If you are a data scientist or have data scientists on your team, you’ve probably heard quite a few complaints about how long it takes to get data into a shape where it can be analyzed. Data clean rooms will reduce this complexity significantly for a lot of advanced analytics.”

Where does a DCR fit in your stack?

Generally, the DCR fits between the organization’s data layer and activation layer.

Here is a basic map that is by no means exhaustive:

At the bottom of the stack is the data infrastructure layer that might include a data warehouse, data lake or similar container. Data governance and identity tools also live in this layer.

Sitting above that is what Milicevic calls the “trust layer,” and that’s where the DCR is. Also in the trust layer are decisioning tools that use data to inform activation found in the layer above it. The activation layer includes all advertising activations and other tools like CDPs that can have activation capabilities.

“What’s particularly attractive about data clean rooms is that they pull out the business logic that used to previously live either in the data infrastructure or activation layers…and now it’s centralizing it,” said Milicevic.

Register and watch The MarTech Conference here.

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Not holding out for long. Thirty-one percent of those not using it expect to do so within a year and 46% within two years, according to the report from Botco.AI.

Why we care. Artificial intelligence is not new to marketing technology. It’s been part of it for at least a decade. However, since OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT last December, generative AI/chatbots are everywhere in martech. So many AI-powered products, features and platforms are being released now that we started a weekly roundup.

Ford’s Model T transformed transportation by making cars affordable to an enormous part of the population. AI has reached its Model T moment and reached it in less than six months.

What it’s being used for. Two-thirds of those surveyed say they use it for brainstorming sessions, first drafts and outlines. Nearly half (49%) say they rely on AI to produce final content. More specifically:

• Image creation 69%
• Text creation 58%
• Audio/voice 50%
• Chatbots 37%
• Coding 36%

B2B leads the way in using AI, with 78% having adopted it, compared to 65% of B2C companies.

Dig deeper: 3 ways B2B marketers can use generative AI

Why it’s not being used. Exactly half of those not using generative AI yet say its because of the team training required to use it effectively. Meanwhile, 45% cited the cost and 45% cited privacy and security concerns as obstacles.

What are they using. The most commonly used tools are:

• ChatGPT 55%
• Copy.ai 42%
• Jasper.AI 36%
• Peppertype.ai 29%
• Lensa 28%
• DALL-E 25%
• Midjourney 24%

Methodology. Botco.AI surveyed 1,000 B2B and B2C marketing professionals in March. Three-quarters of them were from companies with 100 or more employees.

The post 73% of marketers now using generative AI tools appeared first on MarTech.

It’s a chance for digital publishers to show how they are capturing audiences who cut the cord and now choose digital channels. They also want to convince advertisers that their platform innovations and programming are the best way to connects with viewers, especially younger ones.

U.S. digital video ad spend grew at almost twice the rate of overall digital media in 2022, 21% versus 11% overall, according to the IAB.

“Against this amazing backdrop of opportunity we should make no mistake — we are living in challenging and unpredictable times,” said IAB CEO David Cohen, in his opening remarks. “There is a lot at stake and a lot up for grabs.”

Why we care. Presentations at NewFronts make a convincing case that video has earned the attention from brands that television gets with their upfronts — presentations that broadcasters make to advertisers in the spring about upcoming programming. Audiences are moving to streaming services for traditional TV content like movies and sports. Younger viewers who never watched TV regularly are also spending time viewing short-from video content and playing games on their TVs and phones. Marketers have to follow this space in order to meet many of their customers where they are.

The NewFronts. “Despite today’s marketplace being 24/7 and 365-day experience, NewFronts provides a singular moment in time for buyers and sellers to meet and discuss planning for the remainder of the year and next,” Cohen told MarTech. “This is a business built on relationships and we know how important it is to bring the industry together at key times of the year.”

He added, “The video landscape has drastically changed, and ad-supported streaming is reaching a place of maturity. IAB NewFronts has solidified itself as a must-attend event for brands and agencies that are looking to understand where to place their video and streaming budgets. It has evolved into more than just a showcase of content, but a place where real dollars are transacted and real discussions are had about innovation in streaming.”

Samsung Ads. Samsung’s free ad-supported (FAST) service, Samsung TV, is a good example of how digital video is stepping up to deliver premium content in a fragmented landscape.

In their May 2 presentation, Samsung TV announced it’s adding Conan O’Brien TV as a channel to its FAST lineup, as well as expanded local news and weather content. For gamers, Samsung also announced partnerships with video game streamers Antstream Arcade and Blacknut for free ad-supported games.

Three-quarters of U.S. households have at least one Samsung device, including many smart TVs. Smart TV owners can access Samsung TV free to watch programming, play games and navigate to other subscription streaming apps. This gives Samsung Ads device-level data on TV viewers that other video publishers don’t have.

Dig deeper: How Home Depot and Kroger use RMNs to improver shoppers’ ad experience

“We have the number one TV viewing data set globally, which means our TVs provide more consumer viewing data than any other manufacturer by almost double,” said Sang Kim, EVP and GM of North America service business at Samsung Electronics. “This means that we have the number one addressable footprint in the U.S.”

Samsung Ads announced a new partnership with KERV Interactive to make ads on the platform shoppable and interactive. Earlier this year, Samsung Ads launched the ability for advertisers to run QR codes with ads.

They also announced the rollout of digital out-of-home (DOOH) ads later this year, which includes connections to in-store retail partners. This provides an alternative or supplement to brands who are advertising to customers through retailer-owned retail media networks (RMNs).

Amazon Live, Prime Video and Freevee. Amazon’s FAST streaming service Freevee announced it will debut new original programming in 2024, including “Mock the Week,” a panel show produced by comedian Trevor Noah.

Prime Video, which debuted Thursday Night Football last season, announced a new capability for national advertisers to send different commercials to different viewers through Amazon’s Fire TV devices. It also announced that the NFL’s first Black Friday game, aired on November 24, will be free to view for anyone in the U.S.

Also, Amazon Live will have expanded live shoppable entertainment allowing viewers to shop while they watch. New shoppable episodes of “Black Girl Stuff,” — produced by REVOLT, Sean “Diddy” Combs’s media company — will be shown beginning later this month.

The company wants to make “sense of the signals [and] insights at our disposal to create an optimal customer experience that drives business outcomes,” said Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president, ad products and tech for Amazon Ads

YouTube. YouTube is bringing smart advertising to short videos. They announced that its YouTube Select brand safety platform will become available to advertisers of YouTube Shorts content. According to the company, 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users view Shorts monthly.

Measurement and addressability. All the presenters mentioned their reach and datasets. But what about larger concerns across the digital advertising industry related to addressability? Last year, Cohen referred to this challenge as a “slow-motion train wreck.”

“We have always said that the future of addressability will be a portfolio of solutions — it won’t be a simple replacement of the third-party cookies or identifier with something else,” Cohen told MarTech today. “Clean rooms, contextual, seller-defined audiences, cohorts, and many other innovations have been introduced into the marketplace.”

He added, “We continue to push all players in the ecosystem to test, learn, and deploy as the future will undoubtedly not fit into the containers of the past. Now is the time to get in the game.”

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The key to RMN’s success is how interactions with brands can enhance the shopper experience. Digital media experts at Kroger and The Home Depot have spent years developing media networks keeping this key point in mind. If a branded ad interrupts the customer’s journey, it doesn’t help the brand, the retailer or, most importantly, the customer.

Helping when customers research products

Where can brands get involved in the customer journey? At The Home Depot, a supplier approached the retailer about retargeting customers on social media. Soon, the company created opportunities for other suppliers to deliver ads that drove customers to the retailer’s product pages.

This was back in 2018. In 2019, The Home Depot’s Retail Media+ (known as RM+) was launched. Brands now have opportunities to show ads on company owned properties, including homedepot.com, the retailer’s app, in-store and email, as well as offsite media channels like social and video.

“We didn’t want it to disrupt the customer experience,” said Melanie Babcock, vice president, Retail Media+ and monetization for The Home Depot. “Our customer spends a lot of time researching on our site before making a decision. They’re thinking about if they have the right tools, skills, time and capabilities for a project. You have a light to install, should you do it on your own? The consideration time is much less for traditional retailers.”

Because of this longer, more involved customer journey, the retailer decided  decided to let suppliers have the lion’s share of the RMN ad inventory. That means that most of the ads served to customers during their journey are endemic products, ones that can be bought at Home Depot.

“Onsight and in-store are very connected,” said Babcock. “We see that in our customers’ behaviors, and we wanted to be additive to that by keeping the customer in mind and not just monetizing the website. We’re bringing the supplier into the customer journey.”

Personalized precision with customers

Supermarket chain Kroger is another major retailer with a robust RMN, called Kroger Precision Marketing (KPM). KPM is managed under a wholly-owned subsidiary, 84.51˚.

“The common denominator is data science,” said Brian Spencer, KPM’s marketing director. “We have a legion of data scientists available under 84.51˚. There’s shelf assortment and other areas of personalization in our stores. That same talent base is what fuels the personalization behind Kroger Precision Marketing as well.”

Prior to starting its retail media business, Kroger built digital experiences for customers to search products, create grocery lists and receive digital coupons. These tools made it possible for KPM to introduce brands in a relevant way.

Unbranded search terms are 90% of the top 500 searches in Kroger digital touchpoints, Spencer said. That means many customers are looking for products without a specific brand in mind. Directing those customers to a specific brand or product is a logical next step in their journeys.

And, because digital customers are multi-taskers, they aren’t only looking for products available at a Kroger store. For instance, you could be planning a Super Bowl party and need to buy snacks. But what if you also are considering a new TV? Cases like that, but also many others, are where non-endemic brands fit in.

“As we explore non-endemic opportunities, top of mind is that this is activated in a way that isn’t intrusive or obnoxious to our consumers,” said Spencer. “If it’s something that makes sense for our shoppers, we’ll take a look.”

Expanding to offsite journeys

“Retail media data is very advantageous to all kinds of brands, particularly in the grocery category,” said Spencer. Grocery shoppers make purchases several times a month, and often multiple times per week. And these purchases cut across many categories. 

“That kind of information is obviously necessary for consumer packaged goods, but outside of CPG there’s greater interest because some of these non-endemic brands are looking for relevant ways to reach audiences,” he said. “Automotive brands or fast food brands, they may think of our data set as another way to activate across the open web.”

Offsite RMN opportunities are the fastest-growing area for KPM. Kroger has been a partner with streaming service platform Roku for three years. And this week, Disney Advertising announced a partnership with KPM for some Disney media properties, beginning with Hulu.

Dig deeper: CTV added to Kroger’s retail media network business

“Brands, but more typically agencies, are able to go in and activate programmatic display and CTV through a DSP of their choice, and set their own safety standards and activate through a self-service portal — and see sales results and optimize against in-store and online sales,” said Spencer.

“Retail media is more and more being considered as just media,” he added. “It’s more and more part of the total touchpoint consideration set that agencies are looking at. The traditional lines between shopper marketing and brand marketing are becoming more blurred.”

The Home Depot is also looking at how to expand RM+ offsite into CTV. It’s also piloting in-store video screens at 50 locations, currently, to see how shoppers’ digital journeys can be enhanced when they get to the store.

“We’re the last mile in advertising, which is always the most expensive part of the journey,” said Babcock. “There’s huge value to our supplier to connect to that customer and also to know more about that customer.”

The post How Home Depot and Kroger use RMN to improve shoppers’ ad experience appeared first on MarTech.

Ryan Phelan has 25 years experience in email marketing and has written 83 articles for MarTech on that and other topics. He’s the co-founder of RPEOrigin.com, a digital marketing services company with an agnostic approach, and is the chairman emeritus of the Email Experience Council Advisory Board.

Q: How did you get into marketing?

A: I have a funny employment history! I went to college and studied to be a Catholic priest and decided, halfway through the program, that I didn’t want to be a priest. And so then I thought, well, I’m a pretty good DJ. So I worked at a nightclub for six years, being a DJ and running the club. And then I discovered DJing didn’t make any money, and that was during the dot-com boom. 

I got my first internet job with Giftpoint.com, which did gift certificates online. I worked in the affiliate world and I worked in email. And over the years I did a lot with affiliate marketing, and then decided that email is where I wanted to go. It was more fun, more exciting, more new. And that’s where I started my email career, back in 1998. It’s been a heck of a ride! I got a degree in psychology. Most marketers I know don’t have a degree in marketing, they have a degree in something else.

Q: From the DJs I know, it sounds like there’s a psychological component to hosting a party.

A: There is. There are two things I took away from being a nightclub DJ that I still use today that I think are great for marketers. I learned how to read a room. You’re up in the DJ booth putting on music and thinking: What is the crowd going to react to? What is the next song? And you get very attuned to what people are doing and the micro-movements around the room, who’s going up for drinks and so on. You read the entire room and that helps predict the energy level and where you go next. That customer-centric focus is really what I started back in ‘95, entertaining 600 people a night in a nightclub. Taking that into email, I think it’s really about putting the customer first and reading the room.

Q: In email marketing, there’s no single room where everybody is mingling together. Is that why it has to be data-centric?

A: The “room” in email is your reporting, your conversion rate, your online behavior, heat maps, all that kind of stuff. But it’s still this centric approach of reading the room and trying to figure out that everybody is different. 

When I was DJing we had a format, and it was a country nightclub. We developed, really, a science on how to play music in a nightclub. It started with a couple two-steps, a triple-step, which is a little faster-paced, and then another faster song, until you reach this crescendo. And different types of people come onto the dance floor based on what you’re playing. Then you crash it down to another two-step, bring it up again, play another slow song, and then start the whole thing over again. What that does is create a stream on and off the dance floor that is much like segmentation done in marketing. 

In today’s world, most marketers are doing one-to-many messages. They’re not doing any segmentation, it’s the same message to everybody. That’s like me playing the same music over and over again while I’m DJing. But what I’m doing, and what marketers should be doing, is using propensity, using demographic and geographic data, looking at persona-based models, and what you can do to differentiate your message to different archetypes and groups that you identify in the data.

Q: Why do you think email is still such an important marketing channel after all these years?

A: I think there are two upsides for email currently. Number one, we still have a large majority of marketers that still aren’t doing the advanced stuff — segmentation or “reading the room.” There are still companies that are struggling with that. COVID was a great example of how companies finally realized they were underweight in their technology in order to execute email, either in their staff or tech stack. Email came in and saved the day again during COVID. 

The second thing is that with the availability of data, email has the opportunity to continue to grow in sophistication. From identification, to third-party data, to touching outside of email into social media or text or web — email continues to power those full-spectrum experiences. And so the same future I saw for email 25 years ago, I still see today. But it’s predicated on the fact that first we have to get more companies to buy in on the sophistication that email can achieve with data.

Read our Spotlight on contributor Stacey Ackerman here.

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“As the industry demands measurement that is trusted, independent and founded on real viewing from real people, we continue to support the MRC guidelines that set the standard for quality, audited measurement,” Karthik Rao, CEO, Audience Measurement at Nielsen, said in a statement. “It’s our daily mission to maintain our methodologies at the highest standard so that our clients can trade with confidence well into the future.”

Why we care. The suspension was a good thing for marketers in many ways. For nearly all of the broadcast era, Nielsen had what was essentially a monopoly on measuring ratings. For much of that time, both TV networks and advertisers complained about the accuracy of the data. Improving the quality of those numbers means brands are less likely to be paying for audience they aren’t getting.

Also, it has opened the door to competitors. NBCUniversal, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery have all announced they are working with other data providers, including Comscore Inc. and startups such as VideoAmp, iSpot.tv and EDO. More competition means better service.

Dig deeper: Nielsen announces first module for cross-screen audience measurement platform

What happened. The MRC suspended Nielsen’s accreditation in September 2021 for two reasons. First, an investigation by the council found the company undercounted TV viewers during the pandemic because technicians were not able to get into panelists’ homes to fix devices. Second, Nielsen reported a software error had caused it to undercount out-of-home viewership for nearly six months.

Bad timing. The suspension came amidst an ongoing drop in TV viewership which made Nielsen’s ratings less valuable. Since 2011 major network broadcast ratings have dropped more than 80%, according to SpoilerTV. Further, the cord-cutting trend continues apace. The share of Americans who say they watch television via cable or satellite has plunged from 76% in 2015 to 56% in 2021, according to a Pew survey.

The post Nielsen’s national TV ratings gets accreditation back after 19-month suspension appeared first on MarTech.

Why we care. D2C brands are only a click away from their competitors making it easy for online shoppers to compare prices and products. To connect with customers, brands must identify and address the very different motivations that drive sales. Messages that land with one cohort will be wasted on other groups.

Seeking lower prices. The majority of online beauty shoppers are looking for bargains, the study found. This applied to younger consumers as well as older generations.

Sixty-seven percent of Gen Z and millennial digital shoppers said that they preferred to wait in order to pay a lower price on beauty products. And they accepted the risk that items would become unavailable.

Power shoppers. The study also identified a segment of “power shoppers” — those who spent at least $2,500 on beauty products annually.

Among “power shoppers,” 40% are bargain hunters. They spend more overall, but they resist paying full price on individual items.

Super fans. Against these trends, there is a cohort of “super fans” who are, indeed, willing to pay full price for exclusive or rare items.

Twenty-one percent of shoppers said they’d pay full price if they were one of the first customers to purchase the product. And 25% said they would pay full price if it was a limited-edition product.

These shoppers are receptive to brand events that emphasize the scarcity of a product. However, price-conscious customers would likely be discouraged by such an event.

Dig deeper: What is ecommerce and which trends are shaping its future?

The post D2C beauty shoppers are split between low prices and scarcity appeared first on MarTech.

Researching identity resolution vendors

Once you determine an enterprise identity resolution platform makes sense for your business, spend time researching individual vendors and their capabilities by doing the following: 

• Create and prioritize a list of identity resolution use cases, from essential to not necessary. 
• Use that list as a basis for your research — many of the vendors profiled in this report also provide blogs, ebooks and interactive tools that can help. 
• Make a list of the vendors meeting your criteria, reach out to them and set a deadline for replies. 
• Decide whether or not you need to engage in a formal RFI/RFP process.

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

RFI/RFP process

The RFI/RFP process is an individual preference, however be sure to give the same criteria to each vendor to facilitate comparison. The most effective RFPs only request relevant information and provide ample information about your brand and its identity resolution needs. It should reflect high-level strategic goals and KPIs. For example, mention your company’s most important KPIs and how you will evaluate the success of your efforts. Include details about timelines and the platforms in your existing martech stack. 

When written properly, an RFP will facilitate the sales process and ensure everyone involved comes to a shared understanding of the purpose, requirements, scope and structure of the intended purchase. From the RFP responses, you should be able to narrow your list down to three or four platforms to demo.

Demo the platforms

Schedule demos as close together as possible for the best comparisons. Make sure all potential users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following: 

• How easy is it to use? 
• Does the vendor understand our business and marketing needs? 
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Questions for vendors

Here are some questions to ask vendors that touch on important considerations in your identity resolution search:

Data onboarding and privacy 

• Does the platform support first-party data onboarding? 
• Can we incorporate any of our private customer IDs into the platform? 
• Do you use probabilistic, deterministic or a hybrid approach to matching? 
• How do you validate the accuracy of your deterministic matches? 
• What match rate can we expect, given our vertical market and database size? 
• How do you comply with privacy regulations and consumer choice? 

Identity graph 

• Do you own or license your referential identity data? 
• What are your identity data sources? 
• How do you validate the quality of your identity graph? 
• How much of your data is addressable? 
• How is your identity graph linked to offline PII? 
• Do your identity capabilities apply to non-U.S. markets? 

Martech and adtech integration 

• How does the platform integrate with martech platforms (i.e., CRMs, DSPs, CDPs)? 
• Does the platform feature any built-in data activation capabilities (i.e., personalized email or ad campaign execution)? 
• Do you have APIs available for data import/export? 
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our identity efforts? 

Customer support 

The post 24 questions to ask identity resolution vendors during a demo appeared first on MarTech.