Heraclitus once said, “There is nothing permanent except change.” That certainly seems to be the case in the world of marketing, advertising, and the technology that enables both. In few areas is this as apparent as in our current methods of measuring campaign performance. Today’s after-the-fact campaign measurement approach is fundamentally broken and disconnected from the way people interact and provide signals to brands in real time. This results in lost days, months and quarters for marketers before they have the insights they need to optimize the customer experience.
“All great changes are preceded by chaos.” Deepak Chopra
The world of digital marketing has always been dynamic, but with the deprecation of third-party cookies, the evolution of privacy regulations, and the continual raising of big tech’s walls, change is only accelerating. But brands still need to connect with people. They need to create customer experiences that resonate. They need to grow their businesses.
A critical component in making great experiences is understanding. And understanding must happen not just at the end of customer journeys – where measurement has typically lived – but it must actually become part of the journey. Measurement has to move from asking what happened to guiding what will happen. That means to be successful in today’s environment, it is impossible for analysts and marketers to use status quo measurement approaches and get results that will keep them ahead of their competitors.
In short, marketers’ needs and expectations have changed. They need flexibility, speed to market and efficiencies that cloud-based applications can provide.
It’s no secret – everything has gone to the cloud. So, what does that mean for your marketing campaign measurement? To start, measurement needs a new image, from a back-office dashboard activity to a real-time campaign performance indicator and strategy decision driver. Measurement has moved beyond typical end-of-campaign dashboards and is now a checkpoint along the campaign lifecycle. And that gives marketers and analysts the power to gain insights, assess performance and optimize their strategies in real time – or, quite frankly, to let machines do it for them. The cloud brings out-of-the-box powerhouse tools for all levels of users and is giving us new ways to think about data strategies and approaches for cross-platform and omnichannel measurement.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” Charles Darwin
At Acxiom, we have been working hand in hand with select cloud providers to advocate for a new way to think about and perform measurement, an approach that ultimately makes marketing more accountable and the customer experience more meaningful.
For example, we have recently announced a partnership with Google Cloud. Brands can now leverage Google Cloud’s leading global infrastructure, machine learning, and artificial intelligence technology with Acxiom’s best-in-class measurement solutions and diverse data sets to enable deeper campaign intelligence.
“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” Albert Einstein
As marketing data moves to the cloud with the real-time capabilities that enables, campaign measurement has a real opportunity to evolve in a fantastic way. The time is now for smart measurement and insightful analytics to move from a past-tense activity to a key component that drives positive customer experiences.
