Marketing in the ‘now economy’

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James “JT” Turner, Founder & President, Delineate; Ben Leet, CEO, Delineate

“Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half,” department store pioneer John Wanamaker is reputed to have once said. And although the world looks very different today, his assessment has continued to hold true for modern marketers.

Great challenges await in the future. Consumers are buying products with a thumb swipe, expecting them on their doorstep within days, hours or even minutes. This is blurring the lines across retail, advertising and brand positioning, making advertising harder to execute and even harder to measure. We are in the consumer era of “now”.

The problem of ‘now’

Marketing tools need to be able to provide reach across multiple channels, often at a single point in time. This transmedia approach of interconnected campaigns has seen new marketing tech (martech) platforms move to the centre of the marketer’s suite of tools, with campaign decisions needing to be made in real time to maximise audience attention and spend. Short-term sales targets drive the need for immediate decisions, which means a need for immediate data. This has led to an increasing reliance on social media and search data to provide answers – even if those answers aren’t accurate.

When good enough is not good enough

Data collected from search engines and social media have a part to play in measurement. Simple social metrics provide marketers with a surface level of brand engagement and audience response to social media posts and campaigns, while social listening technology allows marketers to better understand consumer sentiment around a brand. But these fast solutions come with large caveats.

With heavy reliance on search and social for a broader view of the world, marketers face two main problems – a lack of context, and little in the way of quality control. Many automated tools can find words and associated phrases that help determine sentiment, but this is often confined to a single post relating to a brand or product. It does not place that post in the wider context of an individual’s worldview, beliefs or habits.

And, with the rise of privacy laws, creating an accurate picture of a consumer becomes even more challenging. Consumers who were once accessible via the digital trail they left for marketers to follow are now using private browsing, turning off tracking features on their mobile devices, and are protected by laws governing information gathering tools such as cookies.

Revolutionising market research surveys

Surveys bring expansion and context to the marketing measurement toolkit, showing marketers the iceberg beneath the waterline. They provide a wider understanding of why people do what they do, so they can be influenced. Unlike passive social media monitoring, survey research is active: it helps brands drive real change, which can only be done by understanding how decisions are made, and the causal pathways that drive behaviour.

Market research surveys have historically had a reputation for being slow and disconnected, often used in isolation to answer a particular business question. This world does still exist, but it’s steadily being replaced by daily, actionable survey data, made available in modern data structures and tools from our Delineate Proximity™ platform.

An answer to the measurement and attribution problem

Launched in 2021, the Delineate Proximity™ platform measures advertising campaigns as they happen, across all media channels and touchpoints. It uses daily surveys for a representative view of the world, with data streamed directly into a client’s data lake, so it can be connected to other real-time data for attribution modelling, in-flight adjustments and creative optimisation.

For those worried about that wasted 50 per cent of advertising spend, Delineate Proximity™ offers the solution. Brands using our platform are saving 25 per cent of their overall advertising spend. Get in touch here to talk to us about our revolutionary approach.

Join the research revolution! Learn more at delineate.ai

Originally published on Business Reporter