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The Twitter Tailored Audiences App: What It Means to You

May 8, 2014 — by MediaMath

The Twitterverse is comprised of over 241 million active users with interests in everything from #Sharknado to the Detroit #RedWings to #POTUS. If you sell anything, your audience is almost certainly among the tweeting masses.

MediaMath’s self-service Twitter Tailored Audiences app enables advertisers to reach and engage hyper-targeted consumers on Twitter. The app works by leveraging advertiser’s proprietary data and Twitter’s demographic user data to create and activate promoted Twitter ad campaigns for audiences with a proven interest in a product, service, or category. Advertisers can easily manage all of the audiences they create within TerminalOne and have the choice to manage their campaigns though their own Twitter Ads account or through a Marketing Platform Partner.

Let’s say a brand wants to market a new pair of sandals on their ecommerce site. With the Twitter Tailored Audiences app for TerminalOne, that brand is able target the shoppers who’ve visited the site with an interest in designer shoes, and show them an in-stream Promoted Tweet featuring the just-arrived summer styles. #Winning.

There are so many potential use cases for this robust new app. Twitter reports engagement rate lifts of 45% and conversion rate improvements of 195% with Tailored Audiences. Additionally, Twitter has seen some advertisers reduce their acquisition cost by as much as 73%. Of course, the inherent advantages of Twitter can’t be overlooked. As more than 75% of Twitter’s monthly active users access the site on their mobile devices, the Tailored Audiences app is an effective way to reach users on their smartphones and tablets.

Whether the advertisers’ goal is to drive sales or web traffic, generate engagement, increase brand awareness, or reach new customers, the Twitter Tailored Audiences App in TerminalOne enables advertisers to do so through the creation of custom audience segments from first-party pixels.

Click here to see the use case for the Twitter Tailored Audiences app in TerminalOne.

Read the recent AdWeek story and talk to a MediaMath rep about amping up your social campaigns with the Twitter Tailored Audiences app in TerminalOne.

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Driving Business Results with Programmatic Technology

May 1, 2014 — by MediaMath

As noted in our previous post, the surest way for marketers to fully harness and prove the benefits of programmatic technology is to not just consider it a better way to buy media, but a fundamental evolution in the approach to marketing. This is only fully realized when there is a broader organizational shift; a shift in culture, process and technology. And when all marketers are aligned and working towards revenue goals – which modern marketers should be doing — this operational efficiency will inevitably enable more acute understanding of marketing efficacy, smarter use of budget and greater business results.

Brand marketers are laser focused on generating brand visibility and awareness. The ability to measure the connection of brand awareness campaigns to both off-line and on-line sales is a incredibly powerful tool that allows marketers to identify the incremental ROI for each touch point and better understand the value of each media exposure. A marketing operating system enables marketers to access performance metrics at the impression level and to examine “the whole picture.” Thus, marketers are able to understand the true and overarching impact of revenue. Kellogg’s, a pioneer in programmatic, exemplifies using programmatic technology to look at the bigger picture. When they’re paying the right price for each impression, marketers can drive a high return on their digital ad spend. And being able to identify and connect the drivers of performance creates the opportunity for even stronger optimization. Bottom line – marketing just works better.

Brand marketers that employ programmatic technology are able to drive business results by leading with a customer-centric marketing approach. By activating consumer insights to understand who their best customers are, what their path to purchase looks like, and what messages are most relevant to them along the way, marketers are able to drive profit by engaging only those customers that are most likely to convert. Marketers can increase the likelihood of conversion with customers by employing dynamic creative optimization to connect with customers through personalized messaging. This kind of bespoke messaging can be achieved by targeting customers based on their offline purchase history, age, and a number of other variables. And by activating their own data, as well as third-party data, marketers can engage consumers more with a more cohesive and relevant story across channels. Additionally, digital marketers that employ programmatic solutions aren’t pigeonholed by manual media buys; rather, they’re able to execute marketing at scale.

TerminalOne™ enables marketers to access the world’s supply of inventory from one centralized marketing operating system. MediaMath, through its Automated Guaranteed offering, lets advertisers gain access to premium inventory across key portals and sites on a reserved, upfront basis. MediaMath’s streamlined digital processes enhances the buying experience by removing the back-and-forth of direct sales channels. Ultimately, when an organization is set up to lead a revenue-focused marketing operation, with programmatic strategies at its core, they will be able to drive greater marketing efficacy that is customer-centric, cross-channel, and scalable.

This post is the fourth in a series for marketers with an understanding of programmatic technology who are looking to step it up.

Keep up with this series to further educate yourself on how programmatic technology fits into the bigger marketing picture by following the Step It Up Series on the blog.

Do you have what it takes to integrate programmatic technology more deeply into your business strategy? Take our quiz to identify your level of programmatic sophistication and get to the next level.

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Train Your Brain

April 25, 2014 — by MediaMath

Haven’t seen what we’ve been up to on social recently? Working with our agency Renegade we created #TrainYourBrain, an initiative to enable digital marketing professionals to become better strategic thinkers and make smarter marketing decisions like our proprietary algorithm “The Brain,” which decisions against data to determine the best media, time, and price for every single ad.

From brain trainings with world renowned experts to brain food, to quizzes, we’re actively seeking to test the marketing chops of CMOs.

Check out Renegade’s blog post about our #TrainYourBrain concept, or if you want to check out the real thing click here.

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What’s All The Chatter About?

April 24, 2014 — by MediaMath

Within the last several years, programmatic technology has seen its fair share of the limelight in the media. So what’s all of the chatter about? Programmatic technology has proven its value to advertisers as a real-time, customer-centric approach that drives marketer ROI.

Real-Time
To some, Oreo’s Dunk in the Dark Tweet epitomizes real-time marketing. For MediaMath, real-time marketing means our algorithm, “The Brain,” uses advanced machine learning to determine the audiences, media, and messaging that will achieve the best performance against concrete goals and bids against those impressions in real-time. When considering real-time marketing in the context of consumer behavior, marketers need to think like consumers in order to deliver messaging that resonates. Consumers don’t think of themselves in silos, and marketers shouldn’t either. A consumer may hear about a product from a friend on Facebook, visit the brand’s ecommerce site, search for online deals, and, ultimately, head into the brand’s brick-and-mortar store to purchase the product. By optimizing online activity to offline events and weaving the data together, marketers are able to tell a cohesive brand story to reach consumers at the optimal time across touch points.

Customer-Centric
MediaMath’s technology allows marketers to access, and activate data from one centralized source. By activating data in TerminalOne™, marketers can understand and interact with their customers on a more granular level. Marketers can leverage their first-party data, as well as third-party data, to gain rich customer insights that allow them to market towards consumers in an increasingly individualized manner. Kellogg’s Bob Arnold, speaking about his company’s use of programmatic, told Forbes that, “From an effectiveness standpoint, the use of data allows our brands to find the right consumer when they are most receptive to our marketing message.” Programmatic technology enables customer-centric marketing for marketers by allowing them to:

Discover new audiences through better segmentation and analysis
Target key audiences with stronger creative and integrated media
Analyze campaigns and audience segments to optimize towards better performance.

ROI
The marketing world has long been defined by John Wanamaker’s statement: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Programmatic technology repudiates that statement as digital marketers can clearly understand where and how their ad spend is performing best. Media and consumer product companies using programmatic are seeing 20-40% increases on the results of their media investment and up to a 600% increase on their ROI. Programmatic technology is being talked about because it works. It works in real-time, is customer-centric and has demonstrated to increases ROI for digital marketing efforts.

In case you missed it, check out the last post in this series that identifies the essential attributes at the core of the right programmatic technology and be sure to keep up with this series moving forward by following the Building Block Series tag on the blog.

New to programmatic? Take our quiz to find out where you stand when it comes to your programmatic prowess.

Photo: What? by Veronique Debord-Lazaro

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The Programmatic Shift

April 22, 2014 — by MediaMath

The last blog post in this series identified the key players within an organization that need to align their goals in order to implement programmatic technology. Yet, to realize the full strategic advantage that programmatic can deliver, marketers need to think of it as more than just a better way of buying media; it needs to be viewed as a full organizational shift. The strategic advantage is very real and it’s worth investing the time and energy to ensure the organization is readily equipped to get the most out of their programmatic technology. Here are a few considerations that marketers familiar with programmatic media buying can act on to integrate the technology deeper into their organization:

A New Breed of Marketer: The Marketing Engineer
Companies with a presence in online retail will have a slight advantage when it comes to preparing for the programmatic shift. These organizations will have a vice president of e-commerce or similar executive who can take on the additional marketing technology responsibilities. Organizations lacking a person with these responsibilities will have to ensure their marketing experts and their web technology experts are synched up, and may consider hiring someone with a skill set that traverses both disciplines to unite teams and spearhead programmatic initiatives. At MediaMath, we like to consider this new breed of marketer the Marketing Engineer. We define a Marketing Engineer to be an individual that possesses exceptional analytical, communication, and consulting skills that’s able to execute and oversee management of digital marketing campaigns.

Charge Forward with Revenue Driven Marketing
This sounds simple and straightforward, but it’s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. All online marketing should be accountable, and as marketers, you should be able and prepared to prove that your efforts are moving more products profitably. Leading with revenue-driven marketing effort means that the marketing team can demonstrate that the budget invested in media can be tied to incremental sales online or in-store. The Marketing Engineer will be able to define a solution whereby this can be accomplished, whether it is a tracking a confirmation pixel on your website, or brand sales lift through dark market testing, or pulling in an attribution technology.

Unify Marketing Teams and Efforts
As was raised in the previous post, this is a clear objective, but it’s one that’s easy to lose track of. It’s essential that marketing teams understand they’re working towards a common goal. However, this isn’t always the case. I’ve spoken with retailers whose team’s function in disparate silos within marketing. Search, display and affiliate marketers are separated, working within walls, independent of one another. This becomes incredibly detrimental when it comes to attribution. Finance might recognize that marketing generated $500 million in sales, but the siloed marketing teams will claim they drove $1 billion in sales in total. Obviously Finance is correct, but this needs to be reconciled and a good measurement system needs to be implemented with marketing. Teams have to be more closely aligned to ensure each marketing channel is understood and working in concert with one another to optimize towards clearly defined goals.

With the right integration, programmatic technology can give your company a tremendous strategic advantage with regard to online advertising. Food for thought: Has your company taken the key steps to prepare for the programmatic shift? Review our checklist to see where you stand.

This post is the third in a series for marketers with an understanding of programmatic technology who are looking to step it up.

Keep up with this series to further educate yourself on how programmatic technology fits into the bigger marketing picture by following the Step It Up Series on the blog.

Do you have what it takes to integrate programmatic technology more deeply into your business strategy? Take our quiz to identify your level of programmatic sophistication and get to the next level.

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Programmatic to the Core

April 18, 2014 — by MediaMath

The last blog post in this series laid out key terms that newcomers to the programmatic media space need to know. Now, with a solid understanding of the terms, it will be helpful to understand at the core level, what the best programmatic technology is, and is not.

At the most fundamental level programmatic technology is a tool used by marketers that replaces manual processes of media buying. Programmatic, however, isn’t a technological replacement of jobs once performed by humans. Rather, it allows marketers to plan, execute, and optimize digital marketing campaigns more effectively. At its core, the right programmatic technology is transparent, data-driven, scalable, and holistic.

Transparent: Transparency is a game-changing characteristic of MediaMath’s TerminalOne Marketing Operating System™, as the technology provides full visibility into the economics, data, and media of marketing campaigns. Advertisers who utilize TerminalOne™ can activate their data to improve media across all channels as well as inform creative, promotional, merchandising and pricing decisions. MediaMath’s technological capabilities, as they relate to transparency, reveal the decisions that our proprietary algorithm, “The Brain”, makes on a daily basis. Clients are given full transparency and ownership of all data inputs for their campaigns, translating to complete control over management and execution. Our industry-leading algorithm allows marketers to go beyond the black box and see exactly what combinations of characteristics are driving the greatest impact.

Data-Driven: Programmatic technology enables advertisers to combine the best of data with the best of media in one platform to execute their digital marketing campaigns. Additionally, best-in-class programmatic solutions don’t just allow access to various data providers, they enable advertisers to create rich segments with that data, and activate them in real-time to optimize campaign results. The best programmatic technology enables advertisers to optimize towards goals, not guesses.

Scalable: MediaMath’s offering is firmly rooted in delivering results at scale. MediaMath’s OPEN Partner Marketplace seeks to unify a fragmented industry landscape by connecting advertisers with best-in-class technology, data, and media partners. Through the OPEN Partner Marketplace, TerminalOne™ users have access to the world’s supply of inventory beyond remnant options. By accessing exclusive premium inventory within a centralized marketing operating system, advertisers are able to leverage top-tier placements on premium publishers previously only available through manual direct sales channels, while also benefiting from the seamless workflow and efficiency of programmatic media buying. The consolidation of media buying within one platform drives efficiency, performance and ROI.

Holistic: Last but certainly not least, programmatic technology is holistic at its core. TerminalOne™ delivers one set of consistent metrics so users can evaluate each campaign tactic in the same way, time and time again. Programmatic technology isn’t just a point solution. From transparent pricing, to centralized access to data, to connecting advertisers with the worlds’ media supply, the right programmatic technology encompasses each of the tenets outlined above to drive business results for advertisers.

This blog post is the third in a series for marketers that are curious about programmatic technology and would like to educate themselves on the value it can provide.

Keep up with this series by following the Building Block Series tag on the blog.

New to programmatic? Take our quiz to find out where you stand when it comes to your programmatic prowess.

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Are Your Teams on the Same Page?

April 15, 2014 — by MediaMath

When consumers browse their cellphones or surf the web on their tablet after work, they don’t consciously consider they’re engaging in specific channels, on specific devices, during specific times. Brands realize this and are actively working to unify the experience they offer across all marketing channels in order to play a more active role in the purchase decision-making process. Programmatic technology is a powerful tool for brands to deliver that omni-channel experience, yet putting programmatic into practice doesn’t happen overnight.

Brand marketers need internal buy-in from a number of key stakeholders across the organization to implement programmatic technology. Sure, the digital marketers are already convinced of its value but what about the CFO, the CIO, and the “traditional” marketing teams that play crucial roles in executing brand strategy?

More Money, Less Problems, and a Happy CFO
Programmatic technology has demonstrated itself to be cost effective for digital advertisers. In a 2013, global marketing survey, IBM’s Center for Applied Insights, found that companies who used “forward-thinking” engagement platforms such as programmatic had revenue growth rates that were 40% higher than other companies and profit growth rates that were double those of their peers. Similarly, Gartner estimates that companies “can increase revenue by as much as 20% by taking a programmatic approach to marketing to existing customers.” The marketers of today are expected to drive revenue forward and supply the metrics to back it up. Programmatic technology enables marketers to do that by arming them with insights on campaign performance and customer behavior – both crucial to optimize against in order to drive business results.

Marketing and Information Technology: Together as One
Last week at the Marketo Marketing Nation Summit, Beth Comstock, CMO, GE mentioned a developing role within many large brands: the MIT, or marketing information technologist. At MediaMath, we like to call this new breed of marketer the Marketing Engineer. The responsibilities of the marketer and technologist are becoming increasingly blurred as brands are activating data for marketing insights. Marketing operations now rely heavily on various technologies, yet there still exists a disconnect between IT and marketing departments. According to recent Forrester research “only 45% of marketers and 62% of IT respondents believe that dedicated leadership is in place to support marketing technology investments.” However, many large brands are making the effort to align these departments for agile tech-driven marketing initiatives. The same Forrester survey revealed that “CIOs and CMOs are beginning to see alignment on marketing technology projects, with 70% of IT and more than half (51%) of marketing agreeing that “marketing and IT have shared ownership/responsibility for marketing technology projects.” It’s clear that both the CIO and the CMO need to play an equally important role in the decision making process of onboarding new technology.

Internal Marketing Alignment
Just like the CMO and the CIO need to align on needs, it’s imperative that each marketing team within the organization collaborates to ensure offer alignment across the breadth of marketing channels. If the traditional marketing teams aren’t working in conjunction with the digital team, how can the brand truly deliver a seamless experience to the customer? By unifying marketing teams to pursue the same goal, the brand doesn’t risk missing any opportunities with customers. Programmatic technology gives control of the relationship back to the brand through increased responsiveness to diverse customer interactions. The technology ensures the ability to framework the customer experience by offer, channel, and frequency so that brands only engage customers in a highly customized way.

Smart brands realize the need to deliver a consistent experience that engages customer touch points. However, if key internal stakeholders and marketing teams aren’t on the same page, the hard work dedicated to building a strong marketing practice falls apart. Poorly planned and executed media is a terrible experience for the customer and ultimately negatively impacts growth for the advertiser. Through a clear understanding of the value programmatic technology can deliver, combined with alignment of departments and teams, brands can set themselves up to execute data-driven marketing campaigns that put the consumer first.

This post is the second in a series for marketers with an understanding of programmatic technology who are looking to step it up.

Keep up with this series to further educate yourself on how programmatic technology fits into the bigger marketing picture by following the Step It Up Series on the blog.

Do you have what it takes to integrate programmatic technology more deeply into your business strategy? Take our quiz to identify your level of programmatic sophistication and get to the next level.

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Be in the Know: Key Digital Advertising Terms

April 9, 2014 — by MediaMath

For such a relatively simple concept — matching the right message with the right audience at the right time — the world of digital advertising often seems overly complex. No sooner does a conversation about programmatic begin than people begin employing terms and acronyms with little regard to whether newcomers understand any of it. Here is a handy set of commonly used terms you need to know:

Buyer: An advertiser or agency that is looking to purchase ad space.

Seller: The publisher or owner of a web site that has ad space to sell.
Programmatic: As defined by Winterberry, programmatic is automation technology through which media buyers and sellers align organizational processes in support of ongoing, channel-agnostic customer engagement (and allowing for the continuous optimization of that effort as business strategies evolve).
DSP: A DSP, or Demand Side Platform, is the technology behind programmatic. The DSP facilitates the buying of display advertising auctions, matching audience data with inventory from multiple media sites to put ads in front of target consumers at the right times. The DSP uses sophisticated targeting and optimization algorithms to establish the value of a given impression and place a bid automatically. MediaMath is considered to be the first DSP, a term it coined when the company began in 2007.

SSP: The flip side of the Demand Side Platform, SSPs — standing for Sell Side Platforms — supply publishers with technology to help optimize their advertising revenues by using one vendor to work with multiple demand-side channels, including Ad Networks, Ad Exchanges and DSPs.

RTB: Stands for real-time bidding. RTB places a valuation and bids on individual impressions through the Internet in real-time. The transactions take place on online media exchange platforms.

Online Media Exchanges/Ad Exchanges: These are the virtual marketplaces that connect sellers (the website publishers) and buyers (advertisers). In an Ad Exchange, a buyer or bidder specifies the media they want and how much they’re willing to pay, while the sellers specifies the inventory available and sets a minimum bid price for that inventory. These exchanges work with both Ad Networks and with DSPs.

Ad Network: Think of a network as a middleman that connects advertisers with publishers. These Ad Networks often use a proprietary technology to place display advertising across various sources of publisher inventory, buying that ad space in bulk. Ad Networks work directly with publishers and with Ad Exchanges.

Online Data Providers: Third party companies (such as Nielsen, Experian, LiveRamp and others) that help advertisers and their agencies identify target consumers and the behaviors that go along with them. MediaMath, through its OPEN portal, seamlessly connects buyers with over 250 partners in the OPEN partner marketplace.

Data Exchanges: An online auction marketplace that enables advertisers to acquire the data from Online Data Providers.

Transparency: The goal of true programmatic advertising is to ensure there is no discrepancy as to where ad spend goes. Transparency provides buyers with a complete understanding as to how much each impression is worth and where those impressions are placed online.

Review these terms and expand your programmatic knowledge by visiting the New Marketing Institute website or signing up for their Level 1 Certification: Introduction to Digital Media.

This blog post is the second in a series for marketers that are curious about programmatic technology and would like to educate themselves on the value it can provide.

Keep up with this series by following the Building Block Series tag on the blog.

New to programmatic? Take our quiz to find out where you stand when it comes to your programmatic prowess.

Technology Uncategorized

The Evolution of Online Advertising

April 3, 2014 — by MediaMath

In 1994, back in the days of Netscape, AOL, and dial-up connections, a seemingly innocuous image appeared on Hotwire. This static image was actually an advertisement, the first of its kind, which allowed users who clicked on it to be taken directly to the advertiser’s site. Though initially slow, cumbersome and one-dimensional, this new media held huge promise for brands. The banner ad (as digital display advertising was called a decade ago) captured the interactivity of the Web in ways that more traditional, “one-way” advertising like TV, radio, print and out-of-home advertising couldn’t. Advertisers were quick to jump on board. By 1999, online ad spending reached $1 billion globally.

But the marketing industry wasn’t alone in its investment in online media. As the Internet evolved into a more viable sales medium, businesses began investing in e-commerce and content sites (initially online versions of newspapers or magazines, rather than the branded content of the present day), and selling advertising on those sites. As consumers began using the Internet for more activities (shopping, finding information, entertainment), the tactics employed by advertisers became more sophisticated. Static banner ads gave way to animated banner ads. Then came pop-up ads, pop-under ads, pre-roll video and, importantly, search.

As consumers began using the Internet to find information about new products, sales and shopping, Google began selling advertising based on consumers’ queries. Google’s Adwords program — setting a price for words that could be common in a search — allowed companies to put themselves in front of consumers at exactly the times when consumers were looking for them. No longer did advertisers have to waste money hoping consumers would be receptive.

With both consumers and companies flocking to the Internet for all forms of information and entertainment, the Web became hugely complex. What had once been a simple transaction between advertiser and publisher was filled in with other options to bring marketers even closer to their consumers. Ad servers, ad exchanges, retargeting companies, ad networks, data suppliers and other tools made online advertising more efficient, but also much, much more difficult to track and attribute. With literally trillions of opportunities available for advertising, tracking ad campaigns manually was not only time consuming and inefficient, it was impossible.

With so many clients and so many opportunities, new companies launched to connect buyers (the marketers) and sellers (the publishing companies/site owners) in online auctions that could provide large audiences of whatever target the marketer desired quickly and efficiently. This is the basis of programmatic buying, matching marketers to audiences, at a large scale, in real-time, with the ability to track and verify sales instantly.

As more media becomes digital, programmatic promises to revolutionize media buying and marketing in every realm, including those once considered “traditional.” Television, radio, out-of-home, online video — all of them are primed to be revolutionized with programmatic solutions. There will be no area of marketing that will be untouched by this technology. Programmatic media buying is the holistic solution for digital marketers looking to engage with consumers across the breadth of digital media channels.

This blog post is the first in a series for readers that are curious about programmatic technology and would like to educate themselves on the value it can provide to marketers.

Keep up with this series by following the Building Block Series tag on the blog.

New to programmatic? Take our quiz to find out where you stand when it comes to your programmatic prowess.

Technology Uncategorized

MediaMath Market Watch: A Postcard from Singapore

April 1, 2014 — by MediaMath

Three months since I moved to Singapore and one of the first questions I’m always asked is why I chose to move here? Some people ask why an experienced professional who has worked at what most would consider the leading edge of digital ad sales (ie in UK/Northern Europe) would choose to ply their trade in a seemingly less sophisticated market (ie in APAC). “Aren’t the eastern digital markets several years behind the west?” they ask.

The implication here is that I’ve entered some sort of ad tech Groundhog Day, where I’ll be teaching and advising a new breed of marketers but going over the same ground as I did when I first started in my career at the MediaMath London office.

The reality is not that simple. While the US and Europe may be more mature markets in terms of ad spend, the rate of change in terms of consumer adoption of technology has been much faster in Asia and it’s exhilarating to observe.

The region is at the forefront of mobile innovation. Driven primarily by slow speeds, broadband connections in Asia are low with only 6% compared to 26% in Europe and 15.5% in the Americas. The region therefore relies on mobile as its primary mode of communication. As a result, the number of mobile subscribers has outpaced the rest of the world over the past 10 years,according to the GSMA and is expected to reach 1.9 billion by 2017 which will account for almost half of the predicted global total of 3.9 billion. A recent report by Millward Brown showed that people in Asia who are multi-screen users consume 7 hours of screen media per day in a five hour period – the majority of which is on their smartphones.

The positive for the ad industry is that ad solutions and techniques have not had to make the generational leap from desktop and laptop to smartphone and tablet as they did in the west. Instead, they have been developed directly for mobile from the outset.

Vendors and technology players, are developing effective ad technology to target and track users across multiple channels and devices. Across the APAC region, major brands in the space are also providing a one-stop shop for a multi-channel, cost effective buys.

Yet, despite these advances in both consumer behaviour and the availability of ad technology to help drive more efficient media buys, there is a cultural reluctance to try new methods. The continuing dependency on cost per click (CPC) as the primary means of measuring performance campaigns is a good example of this. In Europe and the US, marketers are now far more aware of metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), Conversion Rate (CR) and Lifetime Value (LTV) to provide a much clearer view of their return on investment (ROI).

Greater use of attribution modelling and the uptake of the tools to enable it, will give marketers in the APAC region a huge advantage. The market is primed for effective multi-platform marketing. ‘Shifting’ between individual screens remains the dominant form of screen use in the region at 61% of screen time (Millward Brown). Whilst there’s no shortage of innovation in terms of actual mobile marketing campaigns (you’d be hard pressed to see any ad campaign that didn’t have a mobile element), the means of measuring campaign success lags behind.

In a multi device market like this, attribution and finding a good attribution partner is essential for marketers to understand where consumers are engaging with channels and devices. It is also important to understand how this engagement differs between individual consumers or target groups. Attribution isn’t simple. Very rarely is there a ‘one size fits all’ model. In more mature markets such as Europe and the US, marketers are still grappling with finding the best model to suit their individual needs. Finding a partner that can help identify the best performing channels (such as display, search, social and native ads) and how these differ across devices (such as smartphone, tablet, laptop or connected TVs) will give marketers in a market as diverse and mobile forward as APAC, a big advantage over their competition.

So when asked why I moved to Singapore, aside from the great weather and hospitable people, it’s pretty easy to answer ‘to stay ahead of the curve.’

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