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AdTech and MarTech ConvergenceHow Data is Transforming the Customer Journey

ContentsA Top-of-Mind Issue With Marketing Professionals ........................................................................................................3

AdTech and MarTech Defined ..................................................................................................................................................4

What’s Driving Convergence? ..................................................................................................................................................5The Impact of Data .....................................................................................................................................................................6Audience Data Powers Mass Personalization ....................................................................................................................7Case Study: Metadata.io ............................................................................................................................................................9Case Study: AppsFlyer ............................................................................................................................................................10Case Study: ZypMedia ............................................................................................................................................................11 Virtuous Exchange of Value ..................................................................................................................................................12

3 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

A Top-of-Mind Issue With Marketing Professionals

The convergence of advertising technology (AdTech) and marketing technology (MarTech) is a popular topic among advertising and marketing leaders today.

Organizations are moving quickly to adopt integrated AdTech and MarTech strategies. A 2017 Forrester survey of 108 marketing decision makers revealed that nearly all were in various stages of planning or implementing the integration of their advertising and marketing data. More than a third had already completed integration or were in the process of doing so, and more than half were in the planning stages. Only 7% of respondents were doing nothing.

AdTech and MarTech Convergence | 4

AdTech and MarTech Defined

AdTech systems used by publishers and agencies have traditionally been separate and distinct from the MarTech systems that most CMOs rely on to build and nurture customer relationships.

AdTech is defined by consulting firm FTI as “Platforms and tools used by publishers, advertising operations and agencies for buying, selling, delivering, displaying, and targeting display, video and mobile ads.” MarTech is defined as “Platforms and tools used by marketing and sales organizations to manage and nurture leads, manage opportunities and customer contacts, and funnel analytics and attribution.”

There are additional points of differentiation between the two technologies.

• AdTech relies on “paid media.” MarTech relies on “owned media.”

• AdTech primarily deals with anonymous information. MarTech deals with PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

• AdTech revenues are transaction-based. MarTech is modeled on subscription revenue.

5 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

What’s Driving Convergence?

Eliminating silos between AdTech and MarTech translates to more personalized customer experiences and a greater ability to quantify the impact of specific advertising and marketing expenditures.

Fundamental aspects driving the change and journey towards convergence include:

• AdTech industry dynamics, especially around fraud, view-ability, ad-blocking software and having an omni-channel approach to advertising

• The massive drive towards customer experience, first-party data, audience attribution and the need for MarTech to track users prior to actual engagement

• Investor interest in subscription-based recurring revenue in contrast to less predictable transaction-based revenue

• A huge shift in consumer viewing behavior from traditional to digital formats, forcing traditional media companies to adapt

• Major advances in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML), allowing new age companies to more effectively target the right audiences at scale by leveraging data more effectively

In essence, convergence is driving a broader array of engagement and touch points throughout the customer journey and yielding a better economic outcome.

AdTech and MarTech Convergence | 6

The Impact of Data

Data is the common thread between AdTech and MarTech. Given that they are accretive, the impact of convergence is felt horizontally across:

Strategy – Combining the ability of AdTech systems to deliver impressions at scale with the ability of MarTech systems to drive qualified leads and outcomes is enabling relevant impressions and follow-ups at scale, at the right time and location.

Data Source – Organizations are more effectively targeting campaigns by integrating aggregated pools and external data sources from AdTech systems with information related to specific individuals in MarTech systems.

Personalization – The capability to process data increasingly faster is enabling a hybrid strategy of personalized ads served in conjunction with personalized marketing content in real time.

Decisions – The ability of MarTech systems to track attribution across channels, and the real-time bidding and recommendations engines of AdTech systems are rapidly intersecting with newer areas like AI/ML-based bidding and content generation.

Delivery – The convergence of personalized messages in owned media that characterize MarTech, and targeted messages in paid media that characterize AdTech, is driving a strong push towards personalization across all media within a broader customer journey cycle.

7 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

Audience Data Powers Mass Personalization

For advertisers and marketers, understanding their audience is paramount. Access to accurate data with an ability to process and make decisions in real-time, at the moment of engagement, provides a core competitive advantage.

There is a prevailing notion that a DMP (Data Management Platform)—a repository used to store and analyze data generated from ad campaigns, ad impressions etc.—is already the nexus where AdTech and MarTech converge. DMPs typically take data from many sources, which is then analyzed, organized and syndicated to publishers and agencies, and marketers.

AdTech and MarTech Convergence | 8

This is evident in several specific areas:

Attribution – As marketers increase spend year-over-year across a multitude of channels, they see that it correlates positively to the rate of their business growth. Understanding which activities fuel growth, and how, becomes essential. This is driving investment in technology and capabilities such as DMP.

Mobile – Mobile has always been a challenge in the AdTech world. It does not support cookies, and as such, cookies and the anonymous tracking and targeting that many DMP and Data Service Providers (DSPs) have employed in the past are rapidly changing. But since the user experience is primarily driven by apps, it is imperative that data attribution start at app usage and behavior.

Value Exchange – As platforms and services merge inside the Big 3 of Digital Advertising world, the value captured by publishers is decreasing. One way publishers are mitigating this challenge is by going into specialized markets. Many are partnering with independent platform providers who have the technical expertise to white-label their capabilities and, ultimately, drive value—via either public or private data exchanges.

The following pages provide case studies that illustrate solutions that address attribution, value exchange, and mobile measurement.

9 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

Metadata.io executes account-based marketing campaigns for B2B using a learned approach, and by combining 3rd party data with multivariate simulation to run hundreds of marketing experiments. Metadata takes the guesswork away from content marketing and amplifies campaigns with opt-in sales qualified leads.

Metadata.io generates the precise audience profile by:

• Connecting to a varied set of third party Business-to-Business (B2B) data sources and determining which ones will provide the optimal leads.

• Our multivariate analysis and constant learning finds bottlenecks in the entire advertising process (audience, but also creative, landing page, messaging, channel, etc.) and most importantly, finds the 10-15% combination (channel, audience, collateral, landing page, etc.) that yields the highest ROI.

• Closing the loop by allowing customers to target and run the right ad campaigns (offers, creative, messaging and channels) with the best ROI.

Running real-time simulations that are performance intensive requires a database that can drive decisions at the right business moment.

AdTech and MarTech Convergence | 10

For a brand, mobile is the most measurable ecosystem ever created. AppsFlyer measures user attribution at the mobile level that tends to be more accurate and insightful than measuring across many sources that a typical DMP employs. Since mobile is more deterministic and consumers interact via apps, brands can measure their campaign effectiveness at a much more precise level.

AppsFlyer takes mobile measurement and marketing to the next level through insights on the entire customer journey through:

Install Attribution—Measuring the value of a marketing campaign by its contribution to an app install and consequent in-app engagement.

Retargeting Attribution—Measuring the value of a marketing campaign by its contribution to in-app engagement.

Multi-touch Attribution—Measuring the value of a marketing campaign across multiple channels.

Mobile attribution requires scale and scale means complexity. Having a database that can support both transient and mission critical data sets is key for the best performance of each campaign.

11 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

As consumer media viewing patterns change, traditional media companies want to deliver ads to audiences across all the channels including display, video, social, TV, and native. ZypMedia takes a unique approach to this challenge by providing a full stack omni-channel programmatic platform to help the media companies navigate the digital world.

Zypmedia bridges the gap between traditional and digital by providing tremendous value in local advertising. It provides a:

• Technology platform built with high-frequency trading software strategies. The unique solution optimizes targeting capabilities for advertisers so they can deliver the right ad to the right user at the right time (improving real-time decision making).

• Platform built to serve local ad campaigns from the ground up offered as a white-labeled solution used by leading media companies.

• Platform driven by automation using AI/ML for local campaign execution, delivery and optimization.

It does this while processing petabytes of data in real-time to drive dynamic decisions.

12 | AdTech and MarTech Convergence

Virtuous Exchange of Value The convergence of MarTech and AdTech is fostering what economists call virtuous exchange of value by enhancing customer experiences to drive growth. The exchange of value occurs by connecting and delivering customer interactions across touch points and devices.

The ability to make decisions quickly is a key strength of AdTech. The ability to analyze data and assign attribution is a key strength of MarTech. The combination of these two capabilities can be extremely powerful. MarTech can be used to aggregate and understand the customer, and to feed the right data into AdTech for refined targeting. This provides customers and clients transparency, agility, and most importantly, relevancy.

So, is there a wedding in the cards? Or are we already on the honeymoon? A growing body of evidence indicates that the convergence of AdTech and MarTech is indeed well underway.

Are You Ready?

Database architecture is an important consideration in any MarTech and AdTech strategy. If you’re an application developer or technical executive, learn why Aerospike’s innovative Hybrid Memory Architecture is the defacto standard among the world’s leading advertising and marketing technology organizations.

Visit https://www.aerospike.com/solutions/adtech-martech/

(+1) 408-462-AERO (2376) sales@aerospike.com www.aerospike.com