Editorial
The Gist
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Merge marketing and advertising. Combining marketing and advertising data under MadTech creates unified customer profiles for better engagement.
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Embrace virtual profiles. Ditch static customer profiles in favor of real-time virtual profiles that use hybrid data architectures.
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Focus on use cases. Use MadTech to hyper-personalize customer interactions and measure metrics like lifetime value while maintaining responsible data practices.
As marketers, we’re all striving to deliver the best customer experience possible and help grow our businesses. One thing we know for sure is that consistent, personalized brand interactions across all channels leads to happier customers.
But with an increased volume of media delivery and consumption, an increasingly distracted consumer and the eventual deprecation of the third-party cookie, it will be harder than ever to achieve a clear, data-driven picture of the customer in 2025. To do so, we must refine our data, analytics and engagement strategies.
I often discuss the concept of audiences with the brands I work with. Unlike traditional segments, which mainly rely on limited demographic data, audiences include all data attributes and variables about a consumer. For audiences to be holistic and valuable to brands, they must source both marketing and advertising data. Here are a few examples to illustrate this.
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Both marketing and advertising software solutions rely on certain consumer information (i.e., identifying data, demographic data and purchase history)
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The purpose of marketing solutions is to nurture long-term relationships with customers across multiple channels and to drive customer engagement, retention and loyalty. Therefore, these solutions rely on digital property engagement metrics, customer support information and voice of the customer data.
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The purpose of advertising solutions is to serve targeted, well-personalized ads to maximize ad revenue. Therefore, these solutions rely on ad engagement history and metrics, real-time device data, contextual ad data and even location data from consumers.
In previous articles, I’ve discussed MadTech — the combination of marketing and advertising data and technologies — and its pivotal role in shaping the future of customer engagement by creating robust customer audiences. This will provide marketers and advertisers with a richer foundational data source and offer better control over marketing and advertising processes. Further, it leads to better customer experiences and sustained revenue growth.
There are three key steps you can take now to modernize your approach to customer engagement across marketing and advertising channels, as these channels continue to converge.
Table of Contents
- Double Down on Data
- Consider the Customer Profile of the Future
- Focus on Outcomes That Drive Value
- Core Questions Around MadTech
Double Down on Data
Optimizing your first-party data strategy is the first action item on the MadTech checklist. As companies transform their data infrastructures, it is prudent for them to think about how they can account for the merger of two previously separate disciplines.
As data deprecation occurs (i.e., the impending phase-out of third-party cookies), it is time to merge capabilities that were previously siloed into either the marketing technology or advertising technology camps. This merger should happen not only at the engagement level but also at the data and analytical insight level.
Consider the Customer Profile of the Future
Gone are the days of trying to continually create and update physical customer profiles. Brands and vendors now understand that this task is difficult if not impossible to achieve. This is due to many reasons, such as data and organizational siloes, poor quality data and insufficient technologies.
Brands that want to succeed at MadTech must embrace the concepts of federated and hybrid data architectures. Virtual customer profiles can be created in real time from a variety of data sources, whether the data is contained in cloud databases or in on-premise repositories. This approach allows brands to avoid large scale data transformation and migration projects year after year. Having these virtual customer profiles and making them accessible for activation to other systems is essential for optimizing the marketing and advertising ecosystems of the future.
Related Article: How AI and Data Analytics Drive Personalization Strategies
Focus on Outcomes That Drive Value
Merging marketing and advertising customer data into virtual customer profiles will allow brands to tackle business use cases they may not have been able to previously master.
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Behavior-Based Offers: Creating interactions that are based on customer behaviors and preferences from both channels will result in more valuable and contextually relevant offers. These include offers across marketing and advertising channels, as well as across service and support platforms.
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Audience Metrics Insights: For the business, calculating audience-related business metrics (i.e., customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value and conversion rates) provides benefits that go beyond marketing and sales. It can also give other departments insight into audience makeup and motivational drivers.
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Hyper-Personalization Impact: Hyper-personalization improves as insights from both marketing and advertising data are integrated. For example, whether a consumer engages with or skips an advertisement can provide valuable insights to inform the customer journey. Still, brands must be transparent about how they collect and use customer data in order to develop new business models. The principles of responsible engagement and the proper use of artificial intelligence offer a trust-building opportunity. Brands that can offer that tangible value will be the ones that succeed.
MadTech isn’t merely a buzzword. Embracing engagement activities with the concept of MadTech in mind will help brands navigate the complexities of modern marketing and advertising, and it will also help them support deeper connections with customers while realizing new avenues for growth and innovation.
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Core Questions Around MadTech
Editor's note: Here are a couple of core questions around the combination of marketing and advertising data and technologies:
How does the deprecation of third-party cookies impact customer engagement strategies?
The deprecation of third-party cookies makes it more challenging for brands to maintain a data-driven picture of their customers. To adapt, companies need to prioritize first-party data strategies and merge marketing and advertising data into a unified framework called MadTech. This approach allows for creating robust, virtual customer profiles that rely on federated and hybrid data architectures, and it allows real-time personalization and better control over customer engagement processes.
What is the role of virtual customer profiles in modern marketing and advertising?
Virtual customer profiles are essential for integrating marketing and advertising data into a single ecosystem. These profiles are dynamically generated in real-time using data from various sources, and this eliminates the need for outdated physical profiles. They allow brands to implement hyper-personalized strategies and create contextually relevant offers across multiple channels, all while maintaining transparency and responsible data use.
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