RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME, RIGHT WORDS
Criteo’s Alexander Gösswein explains how marketers can use ad tech to win over customers in a digital world
“Ilove this online ad!” is not something consumers say very often. Online advertising has hardly ever garnered consumer appeal, and even less so these days, when consumers are looking for relevant, non-intrusive marketing and a seamless user experience across different touch-points. They no longer accept ads that don’t fit these demands, and marketers have seen this first-hand through their shrinking ad performance over time.
Does this mean the end of online advertising is on the horizon? On the contrary, there is good news for marketers in the form of state-of-the-art ad technology. With the help of adtech, marketers can create appealing ads that inspire shoppers with the right product at the right time, while reflecting the brand’s vision and achieving complex marketing goals. The secret recipe to achieve this consists of just two ingredients: the right data and the right technology.
Data is the new oil in marketing. For years, Big Data has been the talk of the town, but even more important are the real-time insights that can be extracted from data. Up-to-date commerce data is the basis for meaningful ads to attract consumers at any stage of the purchasing journey and sophisticated adtech is the required technology to process this data for the best possible advertising results.
The first step in delivering hyper-relevant ads to consumers is the ability to match users across different devices and platforms. Without cross-linking a user to her different devices, whether a smartphone, tablet or desktop, it’s almost impossible to serve up the most relevant ad at any stage of the consumer journey.
Imagine that a consumer visited your online store on a desktop and a smartphone and ended up purchasing from the smartphone. Without knowing it’s the same user, you risk showing her ads for a product she’s already bought, which negatively affects the user’s experience. A deterministic identifier technology is thus the basis for any sophisticated online ad, which requires collaboration with other players in the industry.
Once you can address users across platforms and devices, the next step is to determine which ad to show to a particular user. The aim is to show each individual consumer the most relevant ad at any time, without risking over-exposing the consumer to your ads. In the programmatic world, cutting-edge adtech companies can use predictive bidding, which involves developing and using algorithms to predict the likelihood of each user interacting with a specific ad, based on the user’s shopping data. The decision to show this user an ad at a certain moment is made in real-time before the ad gets displayed. Thus adtech enables advertisers to show consumers the ads they are most interested in at that point in time.
When deciding whether or not to show an ad to a user, a powerful product recommendation is required to define which products will be shown. Forget about the old retargeting model with the famous red pair of shoes that follow you through the internet for weeks after looking at them on a retailer’s website. Modern retargeting processes more complex data to calculate the most appealing products – which are not necessarily the ones the user looked at before.
In addition, adtech today is much more than retargeting. It supports marketing goals from generating awareness and consideration up to driving conversion, while also recommending the products that fit to a user at each stage of the journey, be it a best-of selection, a new collection or a customised product.
Finally, an often forgotten but very important feature of adtech is real-time creative optimisation. Some users unconsciously react to red call-to-action buttons, others to blue ones. Some like more text, some less. Some prefer certain ad formats over others. Real-time creative optimisation defines the right mix of colours, elements, ad styles and formats users will most likely react to, and billions of creatives are possible while keeping in line with the corporate identity of the advertiser.
Adtech has the capabilities to cover all of the above elements, thanks to sophisticated algorithms that are able to process huge volumes of data. As artificial intelligence increasingly becomes an integral part of adtech, it is expected to drive more innovation and achieve the most complex marketing goals. The overall aim is to turn ads into a shopping experience that users love, so that they can say: “I love this shopping assistance!”
Without crosslinking a user to her different devices, whether a smartphone, tablet or desktop, it’s almost impossible to serve up the most relevant ad at any stage of the consumer journey.