A year into my role here leading reporting and analytics product management within MediaMath’s audience management capabilities, I’ve learned a lot about analytics, data storage and management and audience targeting. While I came to this role due solely to the trust my team was willing to place in me after a thorough interview process, I don’t come from an ad tech background per se. In fact, working at MediaMath was a career change after five years in the military and two years working at an education-related nonprofit. But during this year, I’ve learned that MediaMath and ad tech share a lot of similarities with the military–from the tools we build that power a deliberate decision-making process and unlock real-time understanding and responsiveness for our customers to how we apply an after-action review process as a foundation to agile development.
The military has a very defined process by which large decisions are made. It’s called, not so subtly, the Military Decision Making Process. The steps are:
- Receipt of Mission
- Mission Analysis
- Course of Action Development
- Course of Action Analysis
- Course of Action Comparison
- Course of Action Approval
- Orders production, dissemination, transition
As a former Infantry Officer, I had a chance to interact with this process both from below and from within. As a platoon leader in Baghdad in 2006, I executed orders to clear certain neighborhoods, find a specific influential person or set up a combat outpost in a new area of operations, all orders which had gone through this decision-making process at a much higher level, eventually trickling down to my platoon with a simple task in a complex environment. Later in 2009, while working on the staff that served as the operational command for all of Iraq, I saw how the 40+ different staff sections did the difficult thinking and war-gaming (think A/B testing) that supported large efforts for those doing the work on the ground.
Here on the Audience Management team, we are building tools that allow our customers to go through this same thoughtful and deliberate decision-making process, including mission analysis, Course of Action development and Course of Action comparison leading to an executable strategy. For example, our segmentation capabilities allow our customers to learn about their audience in a way they never could before. In a way not meant to be dramatic, understanding people on a very personal level while walking through the Ghazaliya neighborhood of northwest Baghdad influenced the goal and the method of our missions in the same way that understanding the audience of a strategy will influence the goal and method of any particular campaign. Without that intelligence, the infantryman and the marketer risk applying the wrong resources, in the wrong place, with the wrong message.
Our audience management tools unlock the segmentation and deep understanding of audiences through three main features:
- Sequential targeting surfaces users based on a pattern of behavior.
- Relative recency allows T1 customers to respond to lessons learned about timing and effectiveness in an agile-marketing way.
- Overlap analysis exposes linkages between groups that may not have previously been known.
Additionally, our real-time segmentation enables our customers to both understand their audience by size and behavior but also to see immediately when and where they’re having the greatest effect with the greatest efficiency of effort. On the battlefield, we need troops everywhere but are limited by time and space, and one soldier standing alone isn’t effective at anything close to a 160-man infantry company acting together. In an ad campaign, massed effort that is informed by real data drives real results.
As the chief marketing officers that rely on T1 create different courses of action for their next marketing campaign, our tools allow them to do Course of Action Analysis like never before–not with guesses but with real-world data in a real-world environment. The military would dream of this kind of ability to control environmental variables and forecast ‘What would happen if…’ Our Segment Performance Report, for example, relies on an industry-leading even-level data store and powerful logic design that allows customers to build a segment today and see exactly how that segment performed in a past campaign. No guesswork. Real data. When combined with real-time segmentation, the Segment Performance Report allows marketers to dive deep into each course of action, compare multiple courses of action and then precisely apply the right media to the right audience at the right time.
Finally, after analysis and Course of Action selection is complete, our customers are able to seamlessly turn those ‘orders’ into a campaign immediately. Through an integrated workflow that allows for segment creation and immediate targeting, a marketer with MediaMath in their back pocket is able to instantly respond to market conditions with the right media, to the right audience, at the right time. This ability to decrease the decision-to-action timeline is prized in marketing as much as it is in the military. The most powerful tool in any military operation is not the tank or the computer system, but the man or woman behind it, because with their boots on the ground, they can see and respond to their environment immediately.
The infantryman and the marketer are trained not only in skill but also in judgment, both of which require a humility and willingness to test and to learn and to try again. T1 unlocks this decision-making process for marketers in real-time, with greater depth of knowledge that empowers more informed, effective and efficient marketing campaigns.
As I’ve made this personal shift in my career, I’ve learned that the building blocks of mission success are consistent across industries. Understand completely, plan thoroughly and react decisively in a rapidly changing environment, and your strategy will deliver success.