Twice a year, in March and November, when we start and end daylight saving time, I still have a few clocks I need to change manually … the microwave, the stove, a wall clock or two, the clock in my car. It’s a bit of a hassle but not a big deal – the phone clock is the one we all rely on and that changes automatically.
The manual clock change is a good metaphor for how many digital marketers operate their campaigns year-round. Like my home clocks, their marketing platforms are not connected – the email platform does not talk to the content platform and does not talk to the social media buying platform. Like my home clocks, the logic sits in the platform and is not centralized. And like my home clocks, the “decisions” – i.e. changing the time back or up an hour – have to be identified and initiated by humans. I think we can all agree that this is not ideal. Because, unlike my home clocks, marketing decisions need to be timely, are very important and may affect customer satisfaction – and major revenue and profitability – dramatically, in a positive or negative direction.
Therefore, for digital marketing, this necessitated the importance of Acxiom introducing a decisioning tool. Decisioning is a single “brain” or “traffic cop” that directs campaign logic – right audience, right offer, right channel, right time – from a central location. Decisions can be set by the marketer – this customer in California gets the California Pass offer for the amusement park – or are increasingly complemented with algorithms or automation. Decisions are initiated by real-time signals – landing on the home page, abandoning the shopping cart, clicking play in the streaming app – rather than manual or batch actions.
Importantly, decisions can be made across channels. The angry customer service chat in the web app can trigger a suppression of the upsell email. The five-star review can be followed by a loyalty offer. We have all come to expect that our interactions with a brand will be smart, current, with context, and evolving to deepen the relationship. Decisioning makes this possible.
Acxiom is thrilled to announce its decisioning platform as part of our Real-Time Solutions suite. It is a tool for real-time orchestration of marketing campaigns across channels, tightly integrated with the customer database and customer identity. It includes functionality for complex business logic set by the marketer and machine learning for automated decisions. It ingests campaign results to tune the performance of marketing campaigns – no more manual changing of business rules in five or six platforms. And those platforms don’t need to be swapped out – Acxiom ‘s decisioning platform integrates with the leading marketing and ad tech platforms.
Why now?
Decisioning is a concept that has been around in digital marketing for more than 10 years. But with the recent upending of the paid media ecosystem based around Apple’s and Google’s changes rolling out over the next year, now is an especially good time to get your owned (and paid) channels tuned and optimized.
Why Acxiom?
The tech platforms focused on decisioning have not grown up in the world of customer data, but Acxiom has. Without accurate customer data and a clean view of identity, decisioning is directional at best and incorrect at worst. Acxiom knows the valuable segments in customer data in a way that can empower marketers to drive meaningfully better results. With the introduction of the decisioning platform these insights can be unlocked at scale.
We are excited about the opportunity to help. Please reach out to learn more.
P.S. And here’s to ending daylight saving time altogether.
