Where does your tag management system reside on the customer maturity curve, with simple tagging agility at one end and the capacity to support omni-channel personalization at the other?

That was a question addressed to marketers and technologists attending Ensighten’s recent Agility World Tour hosted in Austin, TX.  Tactical tag management has become more and more commoditized since tag management was introduced late in the last decade, according to Ensighten’s James Niehaus, VP of Digital Strategy and Analytics.  In contrast, he told the group, strategic tag management for the enterprise, which occupies the other end of the customer maturity curve, is growing rapidly. That’s because enterprise tag management has become fundamental to solving for the digital experience. It empowers brands to scale, optimize, innovate and customize the MarTech stack. In short, it’s a pillar of modern customer data strategy.

Niehaus went on to explore the difference between tactical tag management as it was introduced nearly 10 years ago and a true enterprise-class platform, starting with something that has forever changed how we live and do business. Consumers using an array of digital devices and platforms to support their lives now control the brand relationship, dictating when, where and how they will interact with you. That makes understanding the customer journey with its growing number of touch points more relevant today than the historic marketing funnel.  Marketing teams need to map all of the points in these journeys if they are to deliver an optimal and seamless customer experience.

Marketing, as result, is now focusing on two primary areas, according to Niehaus: first, how to personalize that journey by integrating online, offsite and offline data, and then, second, how to measure performance, which today is really about attribution, giving appropriate credit to contributions to a successful conversion. Enterprise tag management takes complexity out of this ecosystem, as it collects, integrates and secures data from many sources for action across the entire MarTech stack.

Given the hyper speed at which change has occurred, it shouldn’t be surprising to see that tag management itself has restructured, separating into three levels of maturity, according to Niehaus:

• Free Offerings – Some vendors offering several digital marketing products have internal, pre-packaged tag management. That can be a good starting point, but these are largely relevant only for comparatively simple digital infrastructures with limited scale and security, limited support, and lack of data ownership.
• Basic Packages – Like the free tools, tag management packages in this category rely on client-side methodology and limit much of their focus to templated interfaces for the web, leaving out full omni-channel support required to optimize the experience across all touch points.
• Enterprise Tag Management – These systems deliver basic functionality at much greater scale – and additionally address a much expanded set of challenges. For a tag management system to be truly enterprise, it must support any tag, at any scale, in any channel – including mobile – as well as provide for new requirements in data privacy and security.

What This Means to Digital Marketing

Many tag management players offering a basic tool choke on supporting issues relating to the omni-channel sources of data, new types of innovation in the MarTech stack, and the advent of mobile marketing. If you hear a tag management vendor tell you that you need to hardcode a capability to your website, you’ve automatically lost the agility you were seeking with this type of system.

Enterprise-class tag management systems should support easy and quick deployment of an array of mission-critical tools. It should also deliver the same agility you have on the web to the world of mobile apps. And don’t forget about offsite data, which is essential to complete that 360-degree view of the customer. The data generated by media impressions and email clicks, for example, can be integrated into the customer data layer via the tag management platform, along with valuable CRM or voice-of-the-customer data. That way, when you fire a tag, it won’t just fire to a session or click. It’s firing to a user who may be a high-value customer or a loyal member of your affinity programs.

Future Proofing Digital Marketing

Now let’s look again at that maturity curve in tag management. We see that the business value of the system grows as it expands to meet these evolving challenges. That additionally includes the ability to address privacy issues and secure data. Enterprise tag management wraps a new level of insight, control and privacy options into the platform.

That’s the way to future proof your digital marketing. At the end of the day, we don’t know precisely where business, technology and regulation will go. There’s uncertainty about changing privacy regulations across government jurisdictions, for example, and the impact of massive game-changers like the Internet of Things. But we can future-proof marketing with the ability to operationalize these changing use cases with the enterprise tag management platform as a foundation. In that way, you gain the ability to respond to the market and seize the advantage with new tech innovation.

Download our new “Strategy Brief: Rethinking Modern Enterprise Tag Management” to learn more about how to future proof your marketing.

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It’s true that innovation in marketing technology has been nothing short of stunning. But in enterprise marketing, the technology also must scale. And innovation and scalability are not necessarily easy bed fellows. Innovation gives marketers the ability to experiment, to explore new possibilities, to try out capabilities. You need to “fail fast” to identify and develop what works. Scalability, in contrast, requires standardization. The focus is on core applications in the marketing technology stack. Here the goal is, “fail not.”

Both must be accommodated, according to technology expert Scott Brinker, speaking at Ensighten’s Agility World Tour recently. “In innovation, we want to question the assumptions. We want to look for how things are changing in our environment. But when you’re in a scalability mindset, we want to leverage assumptions.

“Speed is what we want mostly under innovation. How do we get these things fast, how to move it forward. But in scalability, we’re much more focused on dependability and reliability,” he added.

Brinker, of course, in an expert in marketing technology innovation. Five years ago, he became curious about how marketing and IT teams were beginning to converge. To support his thinking, Brinker drew the first of what has become the iconic Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, charting 150 vendors in 2011. By 2016, that number had risen to 3,874—a 26-fold increase.

Among topics explored in his keynote for Ensighten’s industry event, Brinker talked about the competing needs for scalability and innovation in marketing. Senior marketers, he noted, are being asked to innovate and scale simultaneously. Is it possible to develop a single framework, either in IT or marketing, that encompasses both? Brinker’s conclusion is, “no.”

IT organizations, he pointed out, have been wresting with the balance between scalability and innovation for the past decade. IT typically manages the enterprise infrastructure, which includes telecommunications, networking and core business applications. Here scalability and reliability are critical. But IT also has been asked to develop more and more specialized applications for business owners, which has given rise to agile software development. Why wait a year to get a piece of software when it can be produced in weeks using agile processes. Ultimately, IT organizations have moved toward a bi-model approach, in which they “actually run two different kinds of IT management,” at different speeds. “Really, the thing that’s important here is to be very clear with all the stakeholders as to which particular project falls into which category,” Brinker told the gathering.

Bi-Modal Marketing

This same bi-modal approach also applies to marketing. Just as in IT, innovation and scalability can be balanced by understanding that marketing engages in two different modes. Hence, the term, bi-modal approach. Core marketing operations fall on the scalability side of the equation, require enterprise-wide reliability and typically take the lion’s share of budgets. Innovation can take place at the edge.

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For example, Brinker said, “70 percent of a marketing budget might go to the things that you know are going to work. Twenty percent goes to projects that have had some promise and now the marketing team wants to expand a bit. And the remaining 10 percent is to explore the really wild, ballistic, new ideas.”

These ratios may vary, but the basic principle remains the same. It’s not important what the numbers are, but distinguishing between the core capabilities requiring scalability and reliability, while also ensuring the innovation doesn’t get thrown out the window. It’s one more place where marketing can learn from IT and its software developers.

Note: all attendees to any AGILITY World Tour will receive a free copy of Scott Brinker’s new book, Hacking Marketing. Come listen to Scott in person at AGIILTY New York on Sept. 13 and as part of our “Heavyweight MarTech Debate” June 9 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET.

The post Innovation and Scalability Compete in Marketing Technology: Bi-Modal Framework Supports Both appeared first on Ensighten.

The recent debate of two MarTech heavyweights came down to a split decision as these thought leaders went toe-to-toe recently in an Ensighten-sponsored debate. In one corner was Scott Brinker, the founder and CTO of ion interactive and the publisher of ChiefMartec.com. In the other was Mayur Gupta, one of the first-ever Chief Marketing Technologists while at Kimberly-Clark and now SVP and head of digital at Healthgrades. The debate centered on three questions defining marketing and the technology supporting that mission in the years ahead. To learn more, read this post or watch the full-length webinar recording below.

ROUND 1

Who should own marketing technology? Should it continue to be rooted in marketing, or is this something that needs to be managed in a cross-enterprise way?
Our two debaters came out swinging on this issue with Brinker taking a strong stand when he argued the question itself was a little like asking, “who’s in Grant’s Tomb?”

“What is the purpose of this technology? Why are companies adopting it? At the end of the day, this technology is about enabling marketing capabilities to achieve marketing outcomes. It’s all very much around capabilities that marketers invest in to engage with their audiences. Regardless of the implementation or execution, marketers have to take responsibility for the outcomes of this technology. Ultimately that’s where the buck stops in making technology decisions to support those outcomes.”

Gupta took a different tact, emphasizing that it’s critical that organizations understand the gap existing between traditional models of marketing and IT. From the standpoint of skills and operating models, both marketing and IT “have to dramatically evolve and shift in their traditional roles,” he said. Even more, Gupta argued, “IT and marketing cannot deliver the ultimate experience in isolation from each other.”

What is that experience? Gupta defined it as the responsibility to drive topline growth, along with behavior changes among consumers in support of brand engagement. Marketing and IT must be inseparable through the lifecycle of delivering a consumer experience. Pure information technology, such as supply chain or ERP systems, typically have clear business requirements. Marketing applications are more “ambiguous, more loosely defined,” says Gupta, with the end requirement being the ability to deliver multi-channel consumer experiences.

ROUND 2

Should marketers be accountable for the ROI of technology itself? If so, how do you begin to do that?
Gartner analyst Laura McLellan in 2012 predicted that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017 with the explosion in marketing technology. Understanding return on investment (ROI), however, remains one of the most difficult questions for every brand. Gupta argued that, “the best way to think about this is not ROI in the technology, but rather the ROI on the capability, which is a combination of the technology and the strategy and operations. The technology by itself doesn’t move anything, because it’s the consumer who feels and breathe the experience.”

Brinker challenged Gupta around the danger of confusing terms. What’s most relevant to a marketing technology management role – accountability, measurability or attribution? “And then above all, there is the notion of ROI, which is the reason people are in business,” Brinker said. “We make investments, and we want to get a return on them. But the devil is in the details when it comes to measuring ROI and doing it accurately.

“We have the notion that things are measureable quantitatively. But there’s also accountability, someone being held responsible for something that is quantitative or qualitative in nature. Then there’s attribution. We in marketing are collectively trying to figure out how to crack this nut.” In calculating ROI, there are broad variables and changes in the mix, when, for example, a marketing team implements a customer relationship management system over months, if not a year or more. How much of any lift you’ve received is due to the CRM – that goes to the question of attribution.”

That’s why ROI needs to be derived not purely from a toolset, but from the broader capability created, Gupta argues. “Financial acumen is yet another aspect of marketing technology …. The marketing technologist of today is perhaps the CEO of tomorrow at some point.”

ROUND 3

Do we need a “marketing OS,” i.e., an intelligent wrapper around the tech stack to help unify disparate elements and orchestrate better experiences?
The question for the debate’s third round begs the question of definitions. What’s the difference between a marketing OS and a marketing cloud? Brinker’s view is that the marketing OS is less about specific applications and more about an “underlying fabric that connects all of these applications and allows marketers to share key data from customers about events. It becomes essentially the highway system underlying the transportation of all sorts of marketing goodness internally and externally.”

But integrating the applications in a marketing cloud may create something like the “Tower of Babel,” given their scale and scope. Brinker said. “I’m not sure there’s a tremendous advantage in making the cloud into a super integration. The marketing OS generically has more potential by connecting the key data between the applications, to really synchronize at that level.”

Gupta agreed. “At the end of the day, the key is to connect the disjointed pieces. And there are only two things that can make that happen, the pipe and the data. The real value that a marketer is trying to drive is in the data, in the connectivity of data that ties closely to the customer journey as she hops from one channel to another. That’s the biggest challenge marketers face.”

Tag management, Gupta argued, is an important area where many brands are investing alongside a data management platform. “Tag management basically brings data about consumer behavior in one place across touch points, both first party and third.” It’s a way for the technology pieces to become a cohesive unit that can be tied to business and consumer experiences and behaviors.

The debate ended with a look at enterprise tag management when it is embedded as a foundational application in marketing technology. Once the data generated by these applications, these third-party technologies, is unified under a common set of rules and definitions in a customer data layer, it’s possible to create customer profiles as a single source of truth to drive real-time action into the technology stack.

As moderator, I weighed in on how enterprise tag management serves as a foundation for the entire MarTech stack: “In essence, enterprise tag management creates an orchestration layer that can be used to harness the power of all of your marketing, all of your technology, and all of your data to drive more timely, personalized interactions. In effect this becomes a type of marketing OS because you are managing the data and creating the rules that will engage and drive action.”

Who Won the Three-Round Debate?

Who won? We’d have to call it a split decision between two formidable contestants. Brinker and Gupta both have deep convictions about marketing and the MarTech revolution. They don’t always agree, but they always have something meaningful to say to us – whether it’s about winning with new strategies and technologies, or measuring success that follows.

The post Two Heavyweights Debate the Future of MarTech in No-Holds-Barred Encounter appeared first on Ensighten.

According to a new report by Forrester Research, Digital Experience Technology and Delivery Priorities, 2016, strategic technical investment in 2016 will revolve around three areas: personalization initiatives, solving people challenges and assembling digital experience platforms. Software investment solutions for personalization initiatives are expected to revolve around web content management (60% of respondents deemed this a key solution), email marketing (53%) and tag management (51%). However, despite the hype, only about one in four firms reported they use standalone personalization solutions.

So, what is personalization and how does tag management play a role? It depends on whom you ask within any organization.

• The developer assigned to an internal company facing content management system (CMS) may deem personalization to be a work flow opportunity that drives internal efficiencies.
• The product manager of a web site or mobile touch point may consider it the opportunity to show their external customer the next best thing.
• The marketer may consider it the most effective way to ‘speak’ with their customers at the right time, through the right touch points.
• The CMO may consider it a game changer in driving incremental ROI and lifetime value.

Regardless of a person’s responsibility within an organization, one thing is quite clear. If we don’t identify and stitch relevant, actionable and in-the-moment information about a customer’s journey, personalization attempts will remain impersonal.

How do we go about identifying and stitching information to enhance the customer journey, quickly, efficiently and consistently? It starts with the formulation and collection of distinct pieces of information – some may call this meta data. The maintenance and use of this becomes a gargantuan exercise and one that most engineers and developers may help initiate, but soon realize it’s not sustainable or interesting – to them.

However, those pieces of information are a pot of gold for any person who is building the next best customer journey, responsible for increasing engagement, driving revenue and ROI.

If you haven’t fallen off your chair by now, that’s good because there are ways to efficiently and effectively manage millions of pieces of information. It is commonly referred to as “tagging.”

Tagging – or as we call it today, tag management – is a foundational element of personalization. A bit analogous to the immense complexity of our human DNA, tag management helps marketers track the intricacies of the multi-channel customer journey. Tagging is synonymous with identifying and collecting millions of pieces of information. Tagging, when consistently and correctly executed and maintained as part of your organizational DNA, drives knowledge and intelligence for business leaders to act on. Tagging and the management of those tags (the tag management system) can make or break a personalized customer journey.

Think of it like this: if you are building a house and you lay the foundation on quicksand, the house will soon fall. If you build a personalization initiative without a clearly defined tagging solution, personalization will remain impersonal.

What are some select digital business assets you can tag to enable marketing-in-the-moment personalization?

• Content – Any text article, video, picture and other types of content
• Sales / Marketing – A channel, campaign, advertisement, call-to-action, sequence of events, funnel, segment or other elements
• Product – A touch point (page, video, mobile); elements within a touch point, like a right or left rail; load time and other product attributes
• Advertising – Any type of creative, campaign, click, spend, geography and other advertising attributes

In short, tag management makes it possible for businesses to collect – and own – digital data across all digital channels and devices in an orderly fashion. An advanced tag management system, as part of a broader customer data platform, then enables transformation and distribution of data to existing marketing technology applications to fuel personalization and enhanced insights. That’s the innovation Ensighten has pioneered.  And it’s the foundation for tagging, data collection and stitching of relevant, actionable information for personalization.

Download the new Forrester report, Digital Experience Technology And Delivery Priorities, 2016, today to learn more.

The post New Report: Tag Management Among Top 3 Investments to Support Personalization appeared first on Ensighten.

Last month, Gartner Research introduced a new industry category into its latest “hype cycle” for digital marketing: the customer data platform (CDP), coined in 2013.

“A customer data platform (CDP) is an integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience,” according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016, which was released on July 15.

According to Gartner, “the customer data platform addresses an acute need for modern marketers, who, tasked with revenue accountability and customer experience, are ever in search of that elusive complete view of the customer, beyond the acquisition stage…A bridge between the traditional marketing database or post-sales CRM system and multichannel campaign management execution engines, the customer data platform arose from the need for a solution that could be controlled and deployed by marketers to unify customer identity in a privacy-compliant way, manage first-party data and connect execution across multiple point solutions.”

Ensighten is a prime example of a customer data platform, which is anchored by its industry leading enterprise tag management system (TMS), with additional products for omni-channel data collection, mobile app deployments, privacy and security, and profile creation and management. Ensighten is currently serving many of the world’s largest brands through this platform, including six of the Top 10 most valuable brands, according to Forbes.

Here is our take on what a CDP should do for you:

1. Be the single source of truth for fueling your revenue streams – A CDP should be a force multiplier in enabling and optimizing existing marketing and advertising efforts around personalization, recommendations, attribution, targeting, re-targeting, media-mix modeling, advertising efficiencies, customer service and many other business functions.
2. Provide a holistic view of your customer journey – Customers begin their journey across multiple touch points, digital and traditional. A CDP should contain a data layer that is anchored by intelligence that is first party to a brand.  Brand specific first-party intelligence should be collected from onsite, offsite and offline journeys and used to create actionable customer profiles and segments to enhance the customer journey.
3. Ability to collect and own every digital and non-digital activity of your customer – Your CDP should be driven by first-party data intelligence and have the ability to stitch customer interactions across devices (e.g. a phone or wearable), platforms (e.g. desktop and mobile) and channels (e.g. paid, owned and earned). You should own your data and not have to rent it back in order to drive your business. An external DMP or DSP will not provide data that is first party to a brand.
4. Fuel real-time decision making – The customer journey is constantly evolving and customers make split second decisions. Your CDP should provide near real-time data collection and dissemination of that intelligence to fuel your next marketing campaign, optimize your conversion funnel, re-appropriate ad buys, feed into your call center work flow, and fuel many other decisions and capabilities.
5. Enable turnkey integration capability with other marketing and advertising technologies – A CDP should enable your business to ‘speak’ with your customers regardless of where that customer might be in the customer journey lifecycle at any moment in time. The ability to integrate with technologies such as advertising solutions, email providers, mobile platforms, video delivery engines and other marketing solutions is critical.  First-party data collection capabilities enable standards for such integrations.
6. Deliver enterprise privacy solutions, including identifying and preventing data leakage – A customer’s journey produces a lot of information that is collected digitally and non-digitally, housed in a CDP. Valuable data about your customer can leak from your web property through a variety of ways. A CDP should be armed with enterprise-level privacy capabilities to monitor and curtail dissemination of customer data, and enable product teams to automate opt-in and opt-out choices for customers.
7. Be vendor agnostic – Owning your data using a first-party data collection engine enables you to control your destiny. A CDP should be designed to be vendor agnostic especially since the marketplace introduces new products and services that are in sync with the ever-changing customer journey. Data standards created by using a first-party data collection engine and housed in the data layer enables a CDP to be vendor agnostic.
8. Offer detailed enterprise workflow, providing access and permissions based on role – A CDP is your single source of truth and intelligence within the CDP will be sought after by various functions with an organization. A data layer that ingests omni-channel, multi-platform and IoT data requires a robust, visual, user friendly work flow tool that should be used by a technical marketer. Organizational access and permissions should be managed through the same tool.
9. Enable raw and/or aggregated data visualization and extraction – For a robust CDP to be leveraged regularly to influence business decisions, both in marketing and across the organization, it should contain either its own visualization capability and/or the ability to plug into any third-party visualization tool. Extraction and ingestion capabilities through APIs, SFTPs and user interfaces are ways to enable internal customers to use information to influence business decisions.
10. Scale and flexibility of data space to fluctuate with your business – The ability for a CDP to grow with the customer journey is critical. The growth in Internet of Things (IoT) devices alone promises a tsunami of new interaction data. One of the most efficient and effective ways to scale is to host your data in the cloud. Cloud services enable your business to focus on driving revenue and ROI while allowing other experts to manage storage services, extraction and ingestion processes (ETLs).

The recognition and market acceleration of the CDP represents not a replacement, but an important expansion of the role of a tag management system. A TMS is a necessary foundation of the modern day CDP because of its ability to collect, manage, act and own first-party data from a variety of sources.  In addition, deep integration with a larger marketing eco-system are key components of enabling personalized, real time and revenue-influencing customer journeys.

The post Top 10 Things a Customer Data Platform (CDP) Should Do For You appeared first on Ensighten.

Is mobile the new prime-time vehicle of choice among media consumers? That’s the evidence in a Yahoo media study with clear implications for marketers seeking to target the right consumers on the right device.

“Mobile is the key to unlocking attention,” said Brian Hedrick, Yahoo’s Senior Manager, Search and Native Strategy, when he shared findings from his company’s recent study, Day in the Life of a Media Consumer, with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, at a recent AGILITY World Tour event. 

In his talk, “Rethinking the Customer Journey,” he offered some surprising data points on media consumption, including behavioral patterns of Millennials and Gen-Xers throughout the day, including the all-important prime-time hours.

One of the big takeaways: brands need to calibrate and target advertising based on device multi-tasking and, even more specifically, mobile app behavior.

Digital dominates time spent by media consumers, but it’s smartphones that threaten TV’s dominance, according to Hedrick. The amount of time spent on smartphones has increased 47 percent since 2013. Within the smartphone, app usage dominates at all hours during the day, including prime time from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the evening, according to the Yahoo media study.

“When we look at the overall way that people use their smartphones, the ultimate story here is that apps have won. About 90 percent of time spent on a smartphone is spent within an app,” Hedrick said. “So if you aren’t marketing in those spaces, if you don’t build a great app environment for that consumer, you’re going to get left behind and other brands who are innovating in that way are going grab their attention.”

Data generated by Yahoo’s Flurry shows that prime-time usage is where the majority of app sessions take place. Use of a smartphone to make telephone calls is the “lowest observed behavior” and largely takes place during the day.

Multi-Tasking – The Attention Game

A recent Yahoo biometric study conducted with Nielsen evaluated some 150 participants divided equally between men and women, and Millennials (18-34 years of age) and Gen-Xers (35-54). Rather than participants reporting behavior, they wore POV glasses and wristwatches with the wearables generating the data. In addition, the study also partnered with RealityMine, a smartphone behavioral tracking software, to determine emotional response. If more than one device was being used at the same time, the one being looked at for more time was considered the primary device.

Yahoo and Nielsen asked – what were participants primarily paying attention to as they consumed media in a multi-tasking environment?  And, second, what device sparked the biggest emotional response? A selection of findings showed:

• TV leads other media in consumption and engagement, but its strength is content, which generates the strongest emotional response. The clear winner for advertising engagement was the smartphone.
• As to multitasking, a combination of TV and laptop was the most frequent regardless of age. Millennials, however, switched devices an average of 8.7 times per hour between three devices: the TV, smartphone and laptop.
• Fifty-seven percent of the time an ad ran on the TV screen, user attention diverted to a digital device. In contrast, smartphone users switched only 25 percent of the time when an ad ran.
• Although TV is the device used the most, smartphones were the device of primary attention regardless of age. Or put differently, 94 percent of the time a smartphone was touched in prime time, it was used as the primary device.

“If you’re running TV ads, people’s eyes go right to the smartphone,” Hedrick said, “or they’re engaging in social messaging or media on their smartphone, while they’re watching television.”

What does this mean for advertising strategy? Clearly brands need a strong, coordinated advertising strategy, especially during prime time, on a smartphone. App environments need to be orchestrated with advertising targeted to user interests at various times of the day.

In fact, successful brands succeeding post-crossover (where time spent on a smartphone is the dominant way users access the Internet) clearly will be those who best understand what consumers are doing on what device and in what context.

Note that Ensighten’s Agility World Tour continues this fall with industry forums in New York (September 13), Chicago (October 11) and London (October 2). Register for an event, or sign up for email updates, at our AGILITY World Tour 2016 site.

The post Marketers: Are You Winning the Attention Game with Digital Multi-taskers? appeared first on Ensighten.

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Clik here to view.Editor’s Note: the following is an interview with technologist and consultant David Raab, of Raab Associates, who has been promoting the advantages of a customer data platform (CDP) since he coined the term in 2013. Recently, Gartner Research introduced the platform into its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. We went back to Raab to get his opinion of this recognition, along with his updated thoughts on the CDP. Ensighten is the leading provider of CDPs for the world’s top brands. This includes enterprise tag management as an anchor, plus additional and powerful capabilities for collecting omni-channel data and creating first-party customer profiles to fuel existing technology investments. Read our latest post, “10 Things a CDP Should Do For You.”

1. Gartner recently introduced the Customer Data Platform (CDP) in its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. This is a term you coined and began talking about in 2013. How does it feel for this term to be officially recognized by a firm like Gartner?
    
   The term has had quite a bit of pick-up in the past year or so, following a slow start. It’s an important concept and represents one of the few fundamental changes in marketing technology in the past decade, because it shifts control of the customer database from IT to the marketers. That’s hugely important because IT could never keep up with marketing’s needs, while marketing at least has a chance of keeping up with itself.  So it enables a range of other changes that would otherwise have been blocked by lack of an adequate data source.
2. Briefly, how would your definition differ from Gartner’s, if at all?
    
   My formal definition of CDP is “a marketer-controlled system that uses persistent, cross-channel customer data to support external marketing execution.” The Gartner definition is “integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience.” They correctly home in on the marketing-controlled bit (“managed by marketers”), which is the most significant change. They are more explicit than I was about the data being unified from multiple channels, which is what I meant by “cross channel.” They didn’t explicitly list “persistent,” which is important because it distinguishes from systems that only look up current data without building a history, but you could argue that’s implied by “database” anyway. Similarly, they weren’t as explicit as I was about connections to external marketing systems, but that’s probably what “enable” implies. So, over-all, I’d say the definitions are very similar.
3. CDPs come in different flavors, but work toward the same goal. What is your view on how tag management – fits into a broader CDP?
    
   Conventional tag management used JavaScript tags, which only capture web data, or perhaps web plus some other digital channels. Some tag management vendors have added other data collection techniques, but in those cases I think “tag management” isn’t the most accurate description. In any event, CDP incorporates all data sources, so I see tag management is a subset of a full CDP. You might also ask whether enterprise tag management itself creates a persistent database or simply captures data and feeds it to a database. The answer probably depends on which tag manager you’re looking at. It’s certainly not essential for a tag manager to include a persistent database. 
    
   Editor’s Note: read more about Ensighten’s leading customer data platform, including enterprise tag management.
4. How does a CDP differ from a DMP (data management platform)?
    
   Again, you could argue that a DMP is a subset within a CDP, since it only captures some types of data (mostly cookies and associated attributes) and offers only limited access. Most DMPs don’t include personal identifiers such as name, email address or phone number, although more are starting to. Sometimes those identifiers are attached to cookies and sometimes they are kept separate. Most DMPs also lack the more advanced segmentation and data preparation features found in CDPs.
5. How do you expect to see the CDP evolve?

   I think the reason CDP has become more widely used is that there are more MarTech specialists within marketing departments, and those people are aware of the need for a CDP and are capable of operating one. That’s quite a new development.
    
   So I think CDPs will become more powerful, especially in terms of managing more types of data (video, devices, mobile apps, locations, etc.) and matching more types of customer identifiers (moving beyond e-mail addresses and cookie IDs to mobile device IDs, and “things” such as smart cars and thermostats. Ironically, the old-school phone number is now gaining increased importance as it becomes a mobile phone number used to send text messages and connect with mobile apps.
    
   Simultaneously, we’ll see richer APIs to let external systems access data within the CDP. We’ll also probably see more built-in decision capabilities to let CDPs play a role in managing customer relationships by picking messages, etc. That is really outside the scope of the CDP definition, but marketers do want to limit the number of systems they work with, so it’s a natural direction for CDPs to evolve.

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What does it take to make an enterprise-class privacy solution work across 20 countries? That was the focus of a presentation by Jim Parker of Dell, Inc., at Ensighten’s recent AGILITY World Tour event in Austin, TX. The name of Parker’s presentation itself tells a story: Privacy Law Changes are Looming – Do You Have a Game Plan?

As the director of digital tools at Dell, Parker leads a team that integrates a suite of digital tools and collects page metrics on dell.com to help more than 1,000 internal users analyze, test and improve the global web site for a half a billion annual visitors. This week his focus was on privacy, the burgeoning growth of rules and regulations protecting personal information − along with Dell’s implementation of a global privacy solution in response.

Dell chose the Ensighten privacy solution as it looked for the best way to stay compliant while doing business across jurisdictional borders that include countries in the European Union, as well as other parts of the world. “We established a cross-functional team right way, and that was a big help in our vendor selection process and in the implementation of a solution,” Parker told attendees. “It wasn’t as if we got the business stakeholders together, then addressed technical and went to legal for review. We did it all together.”

The Ensighten solution has been designed to support enterprise-class privacy policies and implementation processes that vary from one organization to the next, and from one country to another. Parker reviewed the reasons why Dell went with the Ensighten privacy capability:

• Leaves existing tags in place or remove from pages – This was top of the list in Dell’s decision. Some vendors require a company to remove all tags from web pages and then enable or disable then in a separate tool as part of implementing a privacy solution. Ensighten makes it possible to leave tags in place or transfer them out, whatever works best in different scenarios. That flexibility was a decisive factor for Dell.

• Handles both implied and explicit consent models – Ensighten supports both models, which vary in different countries. Explicit consent, for example, means that a user visiting a web site must explicitly hit a button acknowledging they understand the web site owner will collect data before they can proceed. Implied consent occurs when a user browses a site, and by implication agrees he or she understands some data will be collected as “strictly necessary.” The Ensighten privacy solution handles both models.

• Protects Dell with a whitelist solution for tags added outside the process – Ensighten has taken a “whitelist approach” to monitor for tags that are placed on a site outside your organization’s view. The solution monitors for these tags and will block any not explicitly allowed in the whitelist.

• Delivers a worldwide infrastructure and commitment to performance SLAs – Ensighten has built an infrastructure with the scale to support large digital ecosystems and is able to commit to service-level agreements (SLA) required by a large enterprise.

• Use for tag management – The privacy solution additionally can integrate with enterprise tag management. Dell implemented the privacy solution first because the company wanted to make sure it addressed the compliance requirement, but then additionally used the implementation for enterprise tag management.

What does a privacy implementation look like to the user? In the U.K., the team went with a “ribbon approach” to make sure − even under an implied consent model − that the user is getting enough information to be aware that the website owner is collecting data. As the user continues, the ribbon is hidden. The Dell team weighed what it believed was an “appropriate amount of time to sufficiently inform a customer,” Parker said. “We were happy with this [ribbon] solution because it doesn’t interrupt the customer too much, but it definitely informs them about the use of cookies and similar technologies.”

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Using the Ensighten solution, a user might also be allowed to opt-out or opt-in for specific information uses based on privacy policy. For example, the visitor might opt out of allowing use of his or her data collected in cookies for analytics for personalization. If the visitor says “no,” then Ensighten privacy solution sets a flag and blocks those tags from firing.

Bottom line, the world of privacy is a high stakes arena. If you don’t adhere to privacy rules, “you can lose your opportunity to do business in a country altogether,” Parker told the group. That’s the risk.

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It’s always of great interest to me to see new trends emerge in our space. One such trend gaining momentum with our enterprise customers solves an old problem with what I’d describe as re-engineering digital analytics. Brands are starting to augment and, in some cases, even replace their existing vendor-based web analytics implementations with their own in-house analytics solutions.

What’s driving this phenomenon?

Just like everything else in our industry, changes in consumer behavior caused by mobile and social trends are disrupting the web analytics space. Just a few years ago, web analytics solutions gave brands the best view into performance of their digital business and user behaviors. Fast-forward to today, and this is often not the case. With the growth in volume and importance of new devices, digital channels and touch points, web analytics solutions are now just one of the many digital data silos that brands need to deal with and integrate into the full digital picture. While some vendors may now offer ways for their solutions to run in different channels and on a range of devices, these capabilities are often still a work in progress.

Many enterprises today find their web analytics solution is just another data source that must be downloaded daily into a multi-channel analytics data store and then run visualization tools like Tableau, Qlikview, or Domo to provide cross-channel business reporting internally. Assuming this is the case, an enterprise is really just paying the web analytics vendor to be an expensive data feed. This new reality is driving some customers to cut the cord on vendor-based web analytics solutions.

Coca-Cola is one of the brands that Ensighten recently helped with cutting the cord. The company shared its story late last year at an AGILITY event in New York City, which was covered by AdExchanger.

The key point is there are varied ways available to enterprises looking to stand up digital analytics in-house.

Interested in learning more?

I explore this topic much deeper in my new strategy brief, “Web Analytics Liberation: How Enterprises Are Re-Engineering Their Digital Analytics,” which you can download for free. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this topic.

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Where does your tag management system reside on the customer maturity curve, with simple tagging agility at one end and the capacity to support omni-channel personalization at the other?

That was a question addressed to marketers and technologists attending Ensighten’s recent Agility World Tour hosted in Austin, TX.  Tactical tag management has become more and more commoditized since tag management was introduced late in the last decade, according to Ensighten’s James Niehaus, VP of Digital Strategy and Analytics.  In contrast, he told the group, strategic tag management for the enterprise, which occupies the other end of the customer maturity curve, is growing rapidly. That’s because enterprise tag management has become fundamental to solving for the digital experience. It empowers brands to scale, optimize, innovate and customize the MarTech stack. In short, it’s a pillar of modern customer data strategy.

Niehaus went on to explore the difference between tactical tag management as it was introduced nearly 10 years ago and a true enterprise-class platform, starting with something that has forever changed how we live and do business. Consumers using an array of digital devices and platforms to support their lives now control the brand relationship, dictating when, where and how they will interact with you. That makes understanding the customer journey with its growing number of touch points more relevant today than the historic marketing funnel.  Marketing teams need to map all of the points in these journeys if they are to deliver an optimal and seamless customer experience.

Marketing, as result, is now focusing on two primary areas, according to Niehaus: first, how to personalize that journey by integrating online, offsite and offline data, and then, second, how to measure performance, which today is really about attribution, giving appropriate credit to contributions to a successful conversion. Enterprise tag management takes complexity out of this ecosystem, as it collects, integrates and secures data from many sources for action across the entire MarTech stack.

Given the hyper speed at which change has occurred, it shouldn’t be surprising to see that tag management itself has restructured, separating into three levels of maturity, according to Niehaus:

• Free Offerings – Some vendors offering several digital marketing products have internal, pre-packaged tag management. That can be a good starting point, but these are largely relevant only for comparatively simple digital infrastructures with limited scale and security, limited support, and lack of data ownership.
• Basic Packages – Like the free tools, tag management packages in this category rely on client-side methodology and limit much of their focus to templated interfaces for the web, leaving out full omni-channel support required to optimize the experience across all touch points.
• Enterprise Tag Management – These systems deliver basic functionality at much greater scale – and additionally address a much expanded set of challenges. For a tag management system to be truly enterprise, it must support any tag, at any scale, in any channel – including mobile – as well as provide for new requirements in data privacy and security.

What This Means to Digital Marketing

Many tag management players offering a basic tool choke on supporting issues relating to the omni-channel sources of data, new types of innovation in the MarTech stack, and the advent of mobile marketing. If you hear a tag management vendor tell you that you need to hardcode a capability to your website, you’ve automatically lost the agility you were seeking with this type of system.

Enterprise-class tag management systems should support easy and quick deployment of an array of mission-critical tools. It should also deliver the same agility you have on the web to the world of mobile apps. And don’t forget about offsite data, which is essential to complete that 360-degree view of the customer. The data generated by media impressions and email clicks, for example, can be integrated into the customer data layer via the tag management platform, along with valuable CRM or voice-of-the-customer data. That way, when you fire a tag, it won’t just fire to a session or click. It’s firing to a user who may be a high-value customer or a loyal member of your affinity programs.

Future Proofing Digital Marketing

Now let’s look again at that maturity curve in tag management. We see that the business value of the system grows as it expands to meet these evolving challenges. That additionally includes the ability to address privacy issues and secure data. Enterprise tag management wraps a new level of insight, control and privacy options into the platform.

That’s the way to future proof your digital marketing. At the end of the day, we don’t know precisely where business, technology and regulation will go. There’s uncertainty about changing privacy regulations across government jurisdictions, for example, and the impact of massive game-changers like the Internet of Things. But we can future-proof marketing with the ability to operationalize these changing use cases with the enterprise tag management platform as a foundation. In that way, you gain the ability to respond to the market and seize the advantage with new tech innovation.

Download our new “Strategy Brief: Rethinking Modern Enterprise Tag Management” to learn more about how to future proof your marketing.

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It’s true that innovation in marketing technology has been nothing short of stunning. But in enterprise marketing, the technology also must scale. And innovation and scalability are not necessarily easy bed fellows. Innovation gives marketers the ability to experiment, to explore new possibilities, to try out capabilities. You need to “fail fast” to identify and develop what works. Scalability, in contrast, requires standardization. The focus is on core applications in the marketing technology stack. Here the goal is, “fail not.”

Both must be accommodated, according to technology expert Scott Brinker, speaking at Ensighten’s Agility World Tour recently. “In innovation, we want to question the assumptions. We want to look for how things are changing in our environment. But when you’re in a scalability mindset, we want to leverage assumptions.

“Speed is what we want mostly under innovation. How do we get these things fast, how to move it forward. But in scalability, we’re much more focused on dependability and reliability,” he added.

Brinker, of course, in an expert in marketing technology innovation. Five years ago, he became curious about how marketing and IT teams were beginning to converge. To support his thinking, Brinker drew the first of what has become the iconic Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, charting 150 vendors in 2011. By 2016, that number had risen to 3,874—a 26-fold increase.

Among topics explored in his keynote for Ensighten’s industry event, Brinker talked about the competing needs for scalability and innovation in marketing. Senior marketers, he noted, are being asked to innovate and scale simultaneously. Is it possible to develop a single framework, either in IT or marketing, that encompasses both? Brinker’s conclusion is, “no.”

IT organizations, he pointed out, have been wresting with the balance between scalability and innovation for the past decade. IT typically manages the enterprise infrastructure, which includes telecommunications, networking and core business applications. Here scalability and reliability are critical. But IT also has been asked to develop more and more specialized applications for business owners, which has given rise to agile software development. Why wait a year to get a piece of software when it can be produced in weeks using agile processes. Ultimately, IT organizations have moved toward a bi-model approach, in which they “actually run two different kinds of IT management,” at different speeds. “Really, the thing that’s important here is to be very clear with all the stakeholders as to which particular project falls into which category,” Brinker told the gathering.

Bi-Modal Marketing

This same bi-modal approach also applies to marketing. Just as in IT, innovation and scalability can be balanced by understanding that marketing engages in two different modes. Hence, the term, bi-modal approach. Core marketing operations fall on the scalability side of the equation, require enterprise-wide reliability and typically take the lion’s share of budgets. Innovation can take place at the edge.

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For example, Brinker said, “70 percent of a marketing budget might go to the things that you know are going to work. Twenty percent goes to projects that have had some promise and now the marketing team wants to expand a bit. And the remaining 10 percent is to explore the really wild, ballistic, new ideas.”

These ratios may vary, but the basic principle remains the same. It’s not important what the numbers are, but distinguishing between the core capabilities requiring scalability and reliability, while also ensuring the innovation doesn’t get thrown out the window. It’s one more place where marketing can learn from IT and its software developers.

Note: all attendees to any AGILITY World Tour will receive a free copy of Scott Brinker’s new book, Hacking Marketing. Come listen to Scott in person at AGIILTY New York on Sept. 13 and as part of our “Heavyweight MarTech Debate” June 9 at 11 a.m. PT / 2 p.m. ET.

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The recent debate of two MarTech heavyweights came down to a split decision as these thought leaders went toe-to-toe recently in an Ensighten-sponsored debate. In one corner was Scott Brinker, the founder and CTO of ion interactive and the publisher of ChiefMartec.com. In the other was Mayur Gupta, one of the first-ever Chief Marketing Technologists while at Kimberly-Clark and now SVP and head of digital at Healthgrades. The debate centered on three questions defining marketing and the technology supporting that mission in the years ahead. To learn more, read this post or watch the full-length webinar recording below.

ROUND 1

Who should own marketing technology? Should it continue to be rooted in marketing, or is this something that needs to be managed in a cross-enterprise way?
Our two debaters came out swinging on this issue with Brinker taking a strong stand when he argued the question itself was a little like asking, “who’s in Grant’s Tomb?”

“What is the purpose of this technology? Why are companies adopting it? At the end of the day, this technology is about enabling marketing capabilities to achieve marketing outcomes. It’s all very much around capabilities that marketers invest in to engage with their audiences. Regardless of the implementation or execution, marketers have to take responsibility for the outcomes of this technology. Ultimately that’s where the buck stops in making technology decisions to support those outcomes.”

Gupta took a different tact, emphasizing that it’s critical that organizations understand the gap existing between traditional models of marketing and IT. From the standpoint of skills and operating models, both marketing and IT “have to dramatically evolve and shift in their traditional roles,” he said. Even more, Gupta argued, “IT and marketing cannot deliver the ultimate experience in isolation from each other.”

What is that experience? Gupta defined it as the responsibility to drive topline growth, along with behavior changes among consumers in support of brand engagement. Marketing and IT must be inseparable through the lifecycle of delivering a consumer experience. Pure information technology, such as supply chain or ERP systems, typically have clear business requirements. Marketing applications are more “ambiguous, more loosely defined,” says Gupta, with the end requirement being the ability to deliver multi-channel consumer experiences.

ROUND 2

Should marketers be accountable for the ROI of technology itself? If so, how do you begin to do that?
Gartner analyst Laura McLellan in 2012 predicted that CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017 with the explosion in marketing technology. Understanding return on investment (ROI), however, remains one of the most difficult questions for every brand. Gupta argued that, “the best way to think about this is not ROI in the technology, but rather the ROI on the capability, which is a combination of the technology and the strategy and operations. The technology by itself doesn’t move anything, because it’s the consumer who feels and breathe the experience.”

Brinker challenged Gupta around the danger of confusing terms. What’s most relevant to a marketing technology management role – accountability, measurability or attribution? “And then above all, there is the notion of ROI, which is the reason people are in business,” Brinker said. “We make investments, and we want to get a return on them. But the devil is in the details when it comes to measuring ROI and doing it accurately.

“We have the notion that things are measureable quantitatively. But there’s also accountability, someone being held responsible for something that is quantitative or qualitative in nature. Then there’s attribution. We in marketing are collectively trying to figure out how to crack this nut.” In calculating ROI, there are broad variables and changes in the mix, when, for example, a marketing team implements a customer relationship management system over months, if not a year or more. How much of any lift you’ve received is due to the CRM – that goes to the question of attribution.”

That’s why ROI needs to be derived not purely from a toolset, but from the broader capability created, Gupta argues. “Financial acumen is yet another aspect of marketing technology …. The marketing technologist of today is perhaps the CEO of tomorrow at some point.”

ROUND 3

Do we need a “marketing OS,” i.e., an intelligent wrapper around the tech stack to help unify disparate elements and orchestrate better experiences?
The question for the debate’s third round begs the question of definitions. What’s the difference between a marketing OS and a marketing cloud? Brinker’s view is that the marketing OS is less about specific applications and more about an “underlying fabric that connects all of these applications and allows marketers to share key data from customers about events. It becomes essentially the highway system underlying the transportation of all sorts of marketing goodness internally and externally.”

But integrating the applications in a marketing cloud may create something like the “Tower of Babel,” given their scale and scope. Brinker said. “I’m not sure there’s a tremendous advantage in making the cloud into a super integration. The marketing OS generically has more potential by connecting the key data between the applications, to really synchronize at that level.”

Gupta agreed. “At the end of the day, the key is to connect the disjointed pieces. And there are only two things that can make that happen, the pipe and the data. The real value that a marketer is trying to drive is in the data, in the connectivity of data that ties closely to the customer journey as she hops from one channel to another. That’s the biggest challenge marketers face.”

Tag management, Gupta argued, is an important area where many brands are investing alongside a data management platform. “Tag management basically brings data about consumer behavior in one place across touch points, both first party and third.” It’s a way for the technology pieces to become a cohesive unit that can be tied to business and consumer experiences and behaviors.

The debate ended with a look at enterprise tag management when it is embedded as a foundational application in marketing technology. Once the data generated by these applications, these third-party technologies, is unified under a common set of rules and definitions in a customer data layer, it’s possible to create customer profiles as a single source of truth to drive real-time action into the technology stack.

As moderator, I weighed in on how enterprise tag management serves as a foundation for the entire MarTech stack: “In essence, enterprise tag management creates an orchestration layer that can be used to harness the power of all of your marketing, all of your technology, and all of your data to drive more timely, personalized interactions. In effect this becomes a type of marketing OS because you are managing the data and creating the rules that will engage and drive action.”

Who Won the Three-Round Debate?

Who won? We’d have to call it a split decision between two formidable contestants. Brinker and Gupta both have deep convictions about marketing and the MarTech revolution. They don’t always agree, but they always have something meaningful to say to us – whether it’s about winning with new strategies and technologies, or measuring success that follows.

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According to a new report by Forrester Research, Digital Experience Technology and Delivery Priorities, 2016, strategic technical investment in 2016 will revolve around three areas: personalization initiatives, solving people challenges and assembling digital experience platforms. Software investment solutions for personalization initiatives are expected to revolve around web content management (60% of respondents deemed this a key solution), email marketing (53%) and tag management (51%). However, despite the hype, only about one in four firms reported they use standalone personalization solutions.

So, what is personalization and how does tag management play a role? It depends on whom you ask within any organization.

• The developer assigned to an internal company facing content management system (CMS) may deem personalization to be a work flow opportunity that drives internal efficiencies.
• The product manager of a web site or mobile touch point may consider it the opportunity to show their external customer the next best thing.
• The marketer may consider it the most effective way to ‘speak’ with their customers at the right time, through the right touch points.
• The CMO may consider it a game changer in driving incremental ROI and lifetime value.

Regardless of a person’s responsibility within an organization, one thing is quite clear. If we don’t identify and stitch relevant, actionable and in-the-moment information about a customer’s journey, personalization attempts will remain impersonal.

How do we go about identifying and stitching information to enhance the customer journey, quickly, efficiently and consistently? It starts with the formulation and collection of distinct pieces of information – some may call this meta data. The maintenance and use of this becomes a gargantuan exercise and one that most engineers and developers may help initiate, but soon realize it’s not sustainable or interesting – to them.

However, those pieces of information are a pot of gold for any person who is building the next best customer journey, responsible for increasing engagement, driving revenue and ROI.

If you haven’t fallen off your chair by now, that’s good because there are ways to efficiently and effectively manage millions of pieces of information. It is commonly referred to as “tagging.”

Tagging – or as we call it today, tag management – is a foundational element of personalization. A bit analogous to the immense complexity of our human DNA, tag management helps marketers track the intricacies of the multi-channel customer journey. Tagging is synonymous with identifying and collecting millions of pieces of information. Tagging, when consistently and correctly executed and maintained as part of your organizational DNA, drives knowledge and intelligence for business leaders to act on. Tagging and the management of those tags (the tag management system) can make or break a personalized customer journey.

Think of it like this: if you are building a house and you lay the foundation on quicksand, the house will soon fall. If you build a personalization initiative without a clearly defined tagging solution, personalization will remain impersonal.

What are some select digital business assets you can tag to enable marketing-in-the-moment personalization?

• Content – Any text article, video, picture and other types of content
• Sales / Marketing – A channel, campaign, advertisement, call-to-action, sequence of events, funnel, segment or other elements
• Product – A touch point (page, video, mobile); elements within a touch point, like a right or left rail; load time and other product attributes
• Advertising – Any type of creative, campaign, click, spend, geography and other advertising attributes

In short, tag management makes it possible for businesses to collect – and own – digital data across all digital channels and devices in an orderly fashion. An advanced tag management system, as part of a broader customer data platform, then enables transformation and distribution of data to existing marketing technology applications to fuel personalization and enhanced insights. That’s the innovation Ensighten has pioneered.  And it’s the foundation for tagging, data collection and stitching of relevant, actionable information for personalization.

Download the new Forrester report, Digital Experience Technology And Delivery Priorities, 2016, today to learn more.

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Last month, Gartner Research introduced a new industry category into its latest “hype cycle” for digital marketing: the customer data platform (CDP), coined in 2013.

“A customer data platform (CDP) is an integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience,” according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016, which was released on July 15.

According to Gartner, “the customer data platform addresses an acute need for modern marketers, who, tasked with revenue accountability and customer experience, are ever in search of that elusive complete view of the customer, beyond the acquisition stage…A bridge between the traditional marketing database or post-sales CRM system and multichannel campaign management execution engines, the customer data platform arose from the need for a solution that could be controlled and deployed by marketers to unify customer identity in a privacy-compliant way, manage first-party data and connect execution across multiple point solutions.”

Ensighten is a prime example of a customer data platform, which is anchored by its industry leading enterprise tag management system (TMS), with additional products for omni-channel data collection, mobile app deployments, privacy and security, and profile creation and management. Ensighten is currently serving many of the world’s largest brands through this platform, including six of the Top 10 most valuable brands, according to Forbes.

Here is our take on what a CDP should do for you:

1. Be the single source of truth for fueling your revenue streams – A CDP should be a force multiplier in enabling and optimizing existing marketing and advertising efforts around personalization, recommendations, attribution, targeting, re-targeting, media-mix modeling, advertising efficiencies, customer service and many other business functions.
2. Provide a holistic view of your customer journey – Customers begin their journey across multiple touch points, digital and traditional. A CDP should contain a data layer that is anchored by intelligence that is first party to a brand.  Brand specific first-party intelligence should be collected from onsite, offsite and offline journeys and used to create actionable customer profiles and segments to enhance the customer journey.
3. Ability to collect and own every digital and non-digital activity of your customer – Your CDP should be driven by first-party data intelligence and have the ability to stitch customer interactions across devices (e.g. a phone or wearable), platforms (e.g. desktop and mobile) and channels (e.g. paid, owned and earned). You should own your data and not have to rent it back in order to drive your business. An external DMP or DSP will not provide data that is first party to a brand.
4. Fuel real-time decision making – The customer journey is constantly evolving and customers make split second decisions. Your CDP should provide near real-time data collection and dissemination of that intelligence to fuel your next marketing campaign, optimize your conversion funnel, re-appropriate ad buys, feed into your call center work flow, and fuel many other decisions and capabilities.
5. Enable turnkey integration capability with other marketing and advertising technologies – A CDP should enable your business to ‘speak’ with your customers regardless of where that customer might be in the customer journey lifecycle at any moment in time. The ability to integrate with technologies such as advertising solutions, email providers, mobile platforms, video delivery engines and other marketing solutions is critical.  First-party data collection capabilities enable standards for such integrations.
6. Deliver enterprise privacy solutions, including identifying and preventing data leakage – A customer’s journey produces a lot of information that is collected digitally and non-digitally, housed in a CDP. Valuable data about your customer can leak from your web property through a variety of ways. A CDP should be armed with enterprise-level privacy capabilities to monitor and curtail dissemination of customer data, and enable product teams to automate opt-in and opt-out choices for customers.
7. Be vendor agnostic – Owning your data using a first-party data collection engine enables you to control your destiny. A CDP should be designed to be vendor agnostic especially since the marketplace introduces new products and services that are in sync with the ever-changing customer journey. Data standards created by using a first-party data collection engine and housed in the data layer enables a CDP to be vendor agnostic.
8. Offer detailed enterprise workflow, providing access and permissions based on role – A CDP is your single source of truth and intelligence within the CDP will be sought after by various functions with an organization. A data layer that ingests omni-channel, multi-platform and IoT data requires a robust, visual, user friendly work flow tool that should be used by a technical marketer. Organizational access and permissions should be managed through the same tool.
9. Enable raw and/or aggregated data visualization and extraction – For a robust CDP to be leveraged regularly to influence business decisions, both in marketing and across the organization, it should contain either its own visualization capability and/or the ability to plug into any third-party visualization tool. Extraction and ingestion capabilities through APIs, SFTPs and user interfaces are ways to enable internal customers to use information to influence business decisions.
10. Scale and flexibility of data space to fluctuate with your business – The ability for a CDP to grow with the customer journey is critical. The growth in Internet of Things (IoT) devices alone promises a tsunami of new interaction data. One of the most efficient and effective ways to scale is to host your data in the cloud. Cloud services enable your business to focus on driving revenue and ROI while allowing other experts to manage storage services, extraction and ingestion processes (ETLs).

The recognition and market acceleration of the CDP represents not a replacement, but an important expansion of the role of a tag management system. A TMS is a necessary foundation of the modern day CDP because of its ability to collect, manage, act and own first-party data from a variety of sources.  In addition, deep integration with a larger marketing eco-system are key components of enabling personalized, real time and revenue-influencing customer journeys.

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Is mobile the new prime-time vehicle of choice among media consumers? That’s the evidence in a Yahoo media study with clear implications for marketers seeking to target the right consumers on the right device.

“Mobile is the key to unlocking attention,” said Brian Hedrick, Yahoo’s Senior Manager, Search and Native Strategy, when he shared findings from his company’s recent study, Day in the Life of a Media Consumer, with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, at a recent AGILITY World Tour event. 

In his talk, “Rethinking the Customer Journey,” he offered some surprising data points on media consumption, including behavioral patterns of Millennials and Gen-Xers throughout the day, including the all-important prime-time hours.

One of the big takeaways: brands need to calibrate and target advertising based on device multi-tasking and, even more specifically, mobile app behavior.

Digital dominates time spent by media consumers, but it’s smartphones that threaten TV’s dominance, according to Hedrick. The amount of time spent on smartphones has increased 47 percent since 2013. Within the smartphone, app usage dominates at all hours during the day, including prime time from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the evening, according to the Yahoo media study.

“When we look at the overall way that people use their smartphones, the ultimate story here is that apps have won. About 90 percent of time spent on a smartphone is spent within an app,” Hedrick said. “So if you aren’t marketing in those spaces, if you don’t build a great app environment for that consumer, you’re going to get left behind and other brands who are innovating in that way are going grab their attention.”

Data generated by Yahoo’s Flurry shows that prime-time usage is where the majority of app sessions take place. Use of a smartphone to make telephone calls is the “lowest observed behavior” and largely takes place during the day.

Multi-Tasking – The Attention Game

A recent Yahoo biometric study conducted with Nielsen evaluated some 150 participants divided equally between men and women, and Millennials (18-34 years of age) and Gen-Xers (35-54). Rather than participants reporting behavior, they wore POV glasses and wristwatches with the wearables generating the data. In addition, the study also partnered with RealityMine, a smartphone behavioral tracking software, to determine emotional response. If more than one device was being used at the same time, the one being looked at for more time was considered the primary device.

Yahoo and Nielsen asked – what were participants primarily paying attention to as they consumed media in a multi-tasking environment?  And, second, what device sparked the biggest emotional response? A selection of findings showed:

• TV leads other media in consumption and engagement, but its strength is content, which generates the strongest emotional response. The clear winner for advertising engagement was the smartphone.
• As to multitasking, a combination of TV and laptop was the most frequent regardless of age. Millennials, however, switched devices an average of 8.7 times per hour between three devices: the TV, smartphone and laptop.
• Fifty-seven percent of the time an ad ran on the TV screen, user attention diverted to a digital device. In contrast, smartphone users switched only 25 percent of the time when an ad ran.
• Although TV is the device used the most, smartphones were the device of primary attention regardless of age. Or put differently, 94 percent of the time a smartphone was touched in prime time, it was used as the primary device.

“If you’re running TV ads, people’s eyes go right to the smartphone,” Hedrick said, “or they’re engaging in social messaging or media on their smartphone, while they’re watching television.”

What does this mean for advertising strategy? Clearly brands need a strong, coordinated advertising strategy, especially during prime time, on a smartphone. App environments need to be orchestrated with advertising targeted to user interests at various times of the day.

In fact, successful brands succeeding post-crossover (where time spent on a smartphone is the dominant way users access the Internet) clearly will be those who best understand what consumers are doing on what device and in what context.

Note that Ensighten’s Agility World Tour continues this fall with industry forums in New York (September 13), Chicago (October 11) and London (October 2). Register for an event, or sign up for email updates, at our AGILITY World Tour 2016 site.

The post Marketers: Are You Winning the Attention Game with Digital Multi-taskers? appeared first on Ensighten.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Editor’s Note: the following is an interview with technologist and consultant David Raab, of Raab Associates, who has been promoting the advantages of a customer data platform (CDP) since he coined the term in 2013. Recently, Gartner Research introduced the platform into its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. We went back to Raab to get his opinion of this recognition, along with his updated thoughts on the CDP. Ensighten is the leading provider of CDPs for the world’s top brands. This includes enterprise tag management as an anchor, plus additional and powerful capabilities for collecting omni-channel data and creating first-party customer profiles to fuel existing technology investments. Read our latest post, “10 Things a CDP Should Do For You.”

1. Gartner recently introduced the Customer Data Platform (CDP) in its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. This is a term you coined and began talking about in 2013. How does it feel for this term to be officially recognized by a firm like Gartner?
    
   The term has had quite a bit of pick-up in the past year or so, following a slow start. It’s an important concept and represents one of the few fundamental changes in marketing technology in the past decade, because it shifts control of the customer database from IT to the marketers. That’s hugely important because IT could never keep up with marketing’s needs, while marketing at least has a chance of keeping up with itself.  So it enables a range of other changes that would otherwise have been blocked by lack of an adequate data source.
2. Briefly, how would your definition differ from Gartner’s, if at all?
    
   My formal definition of CDP is “a marketer-controlled system that uses persistent, cross-channel customer data to support external marketing execution.” The Gartner definition is “integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience.” They correctly home in on the marketing-controlled bit (“managed by marketers”), which is the most significant change. They are more explicit than I was about the data being unified from multiple channels, which is what I meant by “cross channel.” They didn’t explicitly list “persistent,” which is important because it distinguishes from systems that only look up current data without building a history, but you could argue that’s implied by “database” anyway. Similarly, they weren’t as explicit as I was about connections to external marketing systems, but that’s probably what “enable” implies. So, over-all, I’d say the definitions are very similar.
3. CDPs come in different flavors, but work toward the same goal. What is your view on how tag management – fits into a broader CDP?
    
   Conventional tag management used JavaScript tags, which only capture web data, or perhaps web plus some other digital channels. Some tag management vendors have added other data collection techniques, but in those cases I think “tag management” isn’t the most accurate description. In any event, CDP incorporates all data sources, so I see tag management is a subset of a full CDP. You might also ask whether enterprise tag management itself creates a persistent database or simply captures data and feeds it to a database. The answer probably depends on which tag manager you’re looking at. It’s certainly not essential for a tag manager to include a persistent database. 
    
   Editor’s Note: read more about Ensighten’s leading customer data platform, including enterprise tag management.
4. How does a CDP differ from a DMP (data management platform)?
    
   Again, you could argue that a DMP is a subset within a CDP, since it only captures some types of data (mostly cookies and associated attributes) and offers only limited access. Most DMPs don’t include personal identifiers such as name, email address or phone number, although more are starting to. Sometimes those identifiers are attached to cookies and sometimes they are kept separate. Most DMPs also lack the more advanced segmentation and data preparation features found in CDPs.
5. How do you expect to see the CDP evolve?

   I think the reason CDP has become more widely used is that there are more MarTech specialists within marketing departments, and those people are aware of the need for a CDP and are capable of operating one. That’s quite a new development.
    
   So I think CDPs will become more powerful, especially in terms of managing more types of data (video, devices, mobile apps, locations, etc.) and matching more types of customer identifiers (moving beyond e-mail addresses and cookie IDs to mobile device IDs, and “things” such as smart cars and thermostats. Ironically, the old-school phone number is now gaining increased importance as it becomes a mobile phone number used to send text messages and connect with mobile apps.
    
   Simultaneously, we’ll see richer APIs to let external systems access data within the CDP. We’ll also probably see more built-in decision capabilities to let CDPs play a role in managing customer relationships by picking messages, etc. That is really outside the scope of the CDP definition, but marketers do want to limit the number of systems they work with, so it’s a natural direction for CDPs to evolve.

The post Reflections on the Rise of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) appeared first on Ensighten.

Digital interactions influence nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of dollars spent in-store, but that conversion path stretches across a slew of digital touchpoints, including email, search, onsite interactions and display ads − to name just a few possibilities − before a consumer ultimately buys in-store. How do you determine the value contributed by each component of the digital marketing ecosystem and the impact it has on the business overall, given the fact that digital touch points are often disconnected from each other and from in-store retail activity? That was the Ovative/group’s charter with its client, a billion-dollar-a-year retailer, and the focus of a case study presented at Ensighten’s recent Agility World Tour 2016, an industry forum hosted recently in New York.

Speaking for Minneapolis-based Ovative/group were Greg Engen, SVP of Business Development, and Alex Andrews, Senior Analyst, Measurement and Activation. Ovative, which describes itself as a “measurement and activation agency,” was established to help clients unite disparate data sources and make this intelligence actionable “in market.” Integral to its mission is Ovative’s use of Ensighten Pulse, which solves the problem of collecting and unifying data from online and offline sources, from every digital click to in-store purchases.

Case Study: An Omni-Channel, Billion-Dollar Retailer

The case study in question involved a major specialty retailer with revenue generated annually from more than 1,000 stores and its ecommerce platform. At the most fundamental level, Ovative was called in to solve an enterprise measurement problem. With revenue split 80 percent from in-store and 20 percent from ecommerce sales, the company recognized that measuring digital marketing activity to physical stores was a must, and thus had been working hard to integrate its digital marketing platforms. However, even though the retailer was extracting granular data from each technology in its digital stack, the Ovative team explained, the measurement architecture was producing inaccurate, fragmented and incomplete information.

“While it may look like you are getting a relatively complete view of what’s happening, there’s actually a lot of problems,” said Andrews. “First and foremost, each system identifies a user differently. Your display ad server is going to know exactly when it serves the same ad to the same person; but that’s to say nothing about how your email marketing system is identifying users or your paid search system or any other platform. It really requires stitching the data across all the different data sets.”

“In addition, as much as web analytics tools try to be transparent about the rules and the decisions they are making, at the end of the day, they are still making decisions about data that effect the marketing team,” he said.

Ovative’s goal for the giant retailer was to create an enterprise measurement system that reflected the true value of digital marketing at a tactical level, including digital’s true impact on offline sales.

Pulse: A Flexible, Scalable System

Ovative began by identifying two requirements for a flexible, scalable measurement system that gave an uninterrupted view of users:

• First, the identification of a user would have to be first party to the client, not the platform.
• And, second, data would have to be entirely unprocessed by the capturing system.

“We went out into the world and looked at a bunch of solutions, and the answer was Ensighten Pulse,” Andrews said. Pulse enables universal log-level data collection of every interaction that takes place within the client domain, with all data collected as first party to the client. This includes onsite and offsite digital channels, and extends to data housed in CMS, POS, call centers, loyalty programs and other offline systems.

“After we implemented Pulse, we were able to get much higher identification rates and far more connections to the offline world, and we were actually able to attribute online media to offline conversions. That has been hugely beneficial to the media agency actually buying the media,” he said.

In addition, Pulse “rides side by side” with existing marketing technologies, operating independently from other measurement and execution platforms. As a result, it produces three key benefits for Ovative in managing the client’s data:

• End-to-end control of the data pipeline, all first-party to the client;
• Scalability and flexibility in a Cloud-native stack yielding unprecedented cost efficiencies;
• Platform independence − no integrations or replacements required.

For more information, watch a video of Ovative’s presentation at Ensighten’s Agility 2016 event. Slides can also be seen on SlideShare, Using Ensighten Pulse to Power Enterprise Measurement.

The post Improving Marketing Measurement Through Omni-Channel Data Collection appeared first on Ensighten.

Is mobile the new prime-time vehicle of choice among media consumers? That’s the evidence in a Yahoo media study with clear implications for marketers seeking to target the right consumers on the right device.

“Mobile is the key to unlocking attention,” said Brian Hedrick, Yahoo’s Senior Manager, Search and Native Strategy, when he shared findings from his company’s recent study, Day in the Life of a Media Consumer, with Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, at a recent AGILITY World Tour event. 

In his talk, “Rethinking the Customer Journey,” he offered some surprising data points on media consumption, including behavioral patterns of Millennials and Gen-Xers throughout the day, including the all-important prime-time hours.

One of the big takeaways: brands need to calibrate and target advertising based on device multi-tasking and, even more specifically, mobile app behavior.

Digital dominates time spent by media consumers, but it’s smartphones that threaten TV’s dominance, according to Hedrick. The amount of time spent on smartphones has increased 47 percent since 2013. Within the smartphone, app usage dominates at all hours during the day, including prime time from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the evening, according to the Yahoo media study.

“When we look at the overall way that people use their smartphones, the ultimate story here is that apps have won. About 90 percent of time spent on a smartphone is spent within an app,” Hedrick said. “So if you aren’t marketing in those spaces, if you don’t build a great app environment for that consumer, you’re going to get left behind and other brands who are innovating in that way are going grab their attention.”

Data generated by Yahoo’s Flurry shows that prime-time usage is where the majority of app sessions take place. Use of a smartphone to make telephone calls is the “lowest observed behavior” and largely takes place during the day.

Multi-Tasking – The Attention Game

A recent Yahoo biometric study conducted with Nielsen evaluated some 150 participants divided equally between men and women, and Millennials (18-34 years of age) and Gen-Xers (35-54). Rather than participants reporting behavior, they wore POV glasses and wristwatches with the wearables generating the data. In addition, the study also partnered with RealityMine, a smartphone behavioral tracking software, to determine emotional response. If more than one device was being used at the same time, the one being looked at for more time was considered the primary device.

Yahoo and Nielsen asked – what were participants primarily paying attention to as they consumed media in a multi-tasking environment?  And, second, what device sparked the biggest emotional response? A selection of findings showed:

• TV leads other media in consumption and engagement, but its strength is content, which generates the strongest emotional response. The clear winner for advertising engagement was the smartphone.
• As to multitasking, a combination of TV and laptop was the most frequent regardless of age. Millennials, however, switched devices an average of 8.7 times per hour between three devices: the TV, smartphone and laptop.
• Fifty-seven percent of the time an ad ran on the TV screen, user attention diverted to a digital device. In contrast, smartphone users switched only 25 percent of the time when an ad ran.
• Although TV is the device used the most, smartphones were the device of primary attention regardless of age. Or put differently, 94 percent of the time a smartphone was touched in prime time, it was used as the primary device.

“If you’re running TV ads, people’s eyes go right to the smartphone,” Hedrick said, “or they’re engaging in social messaging or media on their smartphone, while they’re watching television.”

What does this mean for advertising strategy? Clearly brands need a strong, coordinated advertising strategy, especially during prime time, on a smartphone. App environments need to be orchestrated with advertising targeted to user interests at various times of the day.

In fact, successful brands succeeding post-crossover (where time spent on a smartphone is the dominant way users access the Internet) clearly will be those who best understand what consumers are doing on what device and in what context.

Note that Ensighten’s Agility World Tour continues this fall with industry forums in New York (September 13), Chicago (October 11) and London (October 2). Register for an event, or sign up for email updates, at our AGILITY World Tour 2016 site.

The post Marketers: Are You Winning the Attention Game with Digital Multi-taskers? appeared first on Ensighten.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Editor’s Note: the following is an interview with technologist and consultant David Raab, of Raab Associates, who has been promoting the advantages of a customer data platform (CDP) since he coined the term in 2013. Recently, Gartner Research introduced the platform into its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. We went back to Raab to get his opinion of this recognition, along with his updated thoughts on the CDP. Ensighten is the leading provider of CDPs for the world’s top brands. This includes enterprise tag management as an anchor, plus additional and powerful capabilities for collecting omni-channel data and creating first-party customer profiles to fuel existing technology investments. Read our latest post, “10 Things a CDP Should Do For You.”

1. Gartner recently introduced the Customer Data Platform (CDP) in its Hype Cycle for Digital Marketing and Advertising, 2016. This is a term you coined and began talking about in 2013. How does it feel for this term to be officially recognized by a firm like Gartner?
    
   The term has had quite a bit of pick-up in the past year or so, following a slow start. It’s an important concept and represents one of the few fundamental changes in marketing technology in the past decade, because it shifts control of the customer database from IT to the marketers. That’s hugely important because IT could never keep up with marketing’s needs, while marketing at least has a chance of keeping up with itself.  So it enables a range of other changes that would otherwise have been blocked by lack of an adequate data source.
2. Briefly, how would your definition differ from Gartner’s, if at all?
    
   My formal definition of CDP is “a marketer-controlled system that uses persistent, cross-channel customer data to support external marketing execution.” The Gartner definition is “integrated customer database managed by marketers that unifies a company’s customer data from marketing, sales and service channels to enable customer modeling and drive customer experience.” They correctly home in on the marketing-controlled bit (“managed by marketers”), which is the most significant change. They are more explicit than I was about the data being unified from multiple channels, which is what I meant by “cross channel.” They didn’t explicitly list “persistent,” which is important because it distinguishes from systems that only look up current data without building a history, but you could argue that’s implied by “database” anyway. Similarly, they weren’t as explicit as I was about connections to external marketing systems, but that’s probably what “enable” implies. So, over-all, I’d say the definitions are very similar.
3. CDPs come in different flavors, but work toward the same goal. What is your view on how tag management – fits into a broader CDP?
    
   Conventional tag management used JavaScript tags, which only capture web data, or perhaps web plus some other digital channels. Some tag management vendors have added other data collection techniques, but in those cases I think “tag management” isn’t the most accurate description. In any event, CDP incorporates all data sources, so I see tag management is a subset of a full CDP. You might also ask whether enterprise tag management itself creates a persistent database or simply captures data and feeds it to a database. The answer probably depends on which tag manager you’re looking at. It’s certainly not essential for a tag manager to include a persistent database. 
    
   Editor’s Note: read more about Ensighten’s leading customer data platform, including enterprise tag management.
4. How does a CDP differ from a DMP (data management platform)?
    
   Again, you could argue that a DMP is a subset within a CDP, since it only captures some types of data (mostly cookies and associated attributes) and offers only limited access. Most DMPs don’t include personal identifiers such as name, email address or phone number, although more are starting to. Sometimes those identifiers are attached to cookies and sometimes they are kept separate. Most DMPs also lack the more advanced segmentation and data preparation features found in CDPs.
5. How do you expect to see the CDP evolve?

   I think the reason CDP has become more widely used is that there are more MarTech specialists within marketing departments, and those people are aware of the need for a CDP and are capable of operating one. That’s quite a new development.
    
   So I think CDPs will become more powerful, especially in terms of managing more types of data (video, devices, mobile apps, locations, etc.) and matching more types of customer identifiers (moving beyond e-mail addresses and cookie IDs to mobile device IDs, and “things” such as smart cars and thermostats. Ironically, the old-school phone number is now gaining increased importance as it becomes a mobile phone number used to send text messages and connect with mobile apps.
    
   Simultaneously, we’ll see richer APIs to let external systems access data within the CDP. We’ll also probably see more built-in decision capabilities to let CDPs play a role in managing customer relationships by picking messages, etc. That is really outside the scope of the CDP definition, but marketers do want to limit the number of systems they work with, so it’s a natural direction for CDPs to evolve.

The post Reflections on the Rise of the Customer Data Platform (CDP) appeared first on Ensighten.

Digital interactions influence nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of dollars spent in-store, but that conversion path stretches across a slew of digital touchpoints, including email, search, onsite interactions and display ads − to name just a few possibilities − before a consumer ultimately buys in-store. How do you determine the value contributed by each component of the digital marketing ecosystem and the impact it has on the business overall, given the fact that digital touch points are often disconnected from each other and from in-store retail activity? That was the Ovative/group’s charter with its client, a billion-dollar-a-year retailer, and the focus of a case study presented at Ensighten’s recent Agility World Tour 2016, an industry forum hosted recently in New York.

Speaking for Minneapolis-based Ovative/group were Greg Engen, SVP of Business Development, and Alex Andrews, Senior Analyst, Measurement and Activation. Ovative, which describes itself as a “measurement and activation agency,” was established to help clients unite disparate data sources and make this intelligence actionable “in market.” Integral to its mission is Ovative’s use of Ensighten Pulse, which solves the problem of collecting and unifying data from online and offline sources, from every digital click to in-store purchases.

Case Study: An Omni-Channel, Billion-Dollar Retailer

The case study in question involved a major specialty retailer with revenue generated annually from more than 1,000 stores and its ecommerce platform. At the most fundamental level, Ovative was called in to solve an enterprise measurement problem. With revenue split 80 percent from in-store and 20 percent from ecommerce sales, the company recognized that measuring digital marketing activity to physical stores was a must, and thus had been working hard to integrate its digital marketing platforms. However, even though the retailer was extracting granular data from each technology in its digital stack, the Ovative team explained, the measurement architecture was producing inaccurate, fragmented and incomplete information.

“While it may look like you are getting a relatively complete view of what’s happening, there’s actually a lot of problems,” said Andrews. “First and foremost, each system identifies a user differently. Your display ad server is going to know exactly when it serves the same ad to the same person; but that’s to say nothing about how your email marketing system is identifying users or your paid search system or any other platform. It really requires stitching the data across all the different data sets.”

“In addition, as much as web analytics tools try to be transparent about the rules and the decisions they are making, at the end of the day, they are still making decisions about data that effect the marketing team,” he said.

Ovative’s goal for the giant retailer was to create an enterprise measurement system that reflected the true value of digital marketing at a tactical level, including digital’s true impact on offline sales.

Pulse: A Flexible, Scalable System

Ovative began by identifying two requirements for a flexible, scalable measurement system that gave an uninterrupted view of users:

• First, the identification of a user would have to be first party to the client, not the platform.
• And, second, data would have to be entirely unprocessed by the capturing system.

“We went out into the world and looked at a bunch of solutions, and the answer was Ensighten Pulse,” Andrews said. Pulse enables universal log-level data collection of every interaction that takes place within the client domain, with all data collected as first party to the client. This includes onsite and offsite digital channels, and extends to data housed in CMS, POS, call centers, loyalty programs and other offline systems.

“After we implemented Pulse, we were able to get much higher identification rates and far more connections to the offline world, and we were actually able to attribute online media to offline conversions. That has been hugely beneficial to the media agency actually buying the media,” he said.

In addition, Pulse “rides side by side” with existing marketing technologies, operating independently from other measurement and execution platforms. As a result, it produces three key benefits for Ovative in managing the client’s data:

• End-to-end control of the data pipeline, all first-party to the client;
• Scalability and flexibility in a Cloud-native stack yielding unprecedented cost efficiencies;
• Platform independence − no integrations or replacements required.

For more information, watch a video of Ovative’s presentation at Ensighten’s Agility 2016 event. Slides can also be seen on SlideShare, Using Ensighten Pulse to Power Enterprise Measurement.

The post Improving Marketing Measurement Through Omni-Channel Data Collection appeared first on Ensighten.