Why your customer experience is shattered into a thousand odd-shaped shards that ruin everything good and decent. Oh, and what you can do about it.

Smithereens

Let’s face it: marketing is in trouble.Just when it looked like we were getting better and better at this accountability/ measurability/targeting/attribution thing, we’ve hit a massive, immovable wall.

And unless we find a way under, over or around this wall, we’re doomed.*

Doomed to repeat broken processes, waste money, miss opportunities, deliver inconsistent experiences and treat even our very best customers as if we’ve never met them before. Which isn’t what were here for.

*

The weird thing is, we got to this senseless place by being smart.

HUH?!HUH?!

As a species, marketers are clever. We’re constantly discovering cool new ways to find our most likely customers and spray them with our magic brand juice.

HUH?!HUH?!

We turned a nifty little network for academics into an always-on, multimedia, global marketing juggernaut.

We saw that search was the way into this worldwide wonderland, so we piled in, handed the search engines our budgets, and paid per click.

We noticed that people were spending more time on social media than in bed so we beat down the doors – with dozens of weird and wonderful ways to get in on the action.

When mobile got massive, marketers were right there. With apps and sites and ads and in-game purchases.

Somewhere along the way, we figured out that we could measure all these interactions.So we got really good at analytics and attribution models and behavioral marketing.

So what’s the problem

Every single one of those ‘channels’ marketers use to reach their audience is it’s own little island.

And each of these islands – mobile or social or bannerads or native advertising oremail – has dozens of thirdparty partners that can helpyou reach people.Each with its own platform to automate engagements. And each with it’s own way to identify a person. Or a device.

And that’s what got us into this mess.

Because today’s marketing ecosystem is an exploded universe of channels, partners, platforms, data sources, APIs and integrations.

Chiefmartec Marketing Technology Landscape(You wouldn’t believe how many vendors were upset because they were left off of this recent marketing tech landscape.)

This isn’t just fragmentation. It’s atomization.

And because of this complexity, marketers can’t do something critical to a great customer experience:We can’t take what we know about our customers and prospects and apply it everywhere those customers and prospects hang out.

A person we recognize in our store as a left- handed horse-riding cigar smoker gets the same messages as anyone else when she sees one of our ads in Forbes or on Facebook.Or when she decides to interact with the world on a smartphone. Or a tablet. Or a set-top box.

We all knowwhat this means. It means inconsistent, uninformed,wasteful marketing.And consumers who think we’re clueless or misguided or both.(We’re not. We’ve just been rendered blind).

So here’s the thing(Cue music. Nothing too big yet.

Maybe a lone oboe...)

We desperately need someone to come along and connect the marketing ecosystem.

Someone who knows all the different platforms and channel partners. The ad servers, DSPs, DMPs, ESPs, native advertising networks, premium publishers, social media channels, tag managers, site optimization platforms, attribution platforms, CRM systems, marketing automation players…

Someone who can recognize consumers across channels and translate data from one digital address to another. So we can reach our audiences and treat them the same way everywhere.

Someone who can do that without passing on any personally identifiable information. So there’s a kind of ‘built-in amnesia’ that protects privacy while retaining the segments that each person belongs to.

Someone neutral, independent and trusted. So there are no conflicts of interest or weird agendas.(Okay, bring the music up… the horns, the strings, those massive drums…)

By solving the connecting, matching and linking, you are able to make every part of your marketing stack exponentially better.

And it just might be the only way over the wall that stands between all of the smart marketers out there and the kind of marketing they know they can deliver.

We’re back where we started:If we can’t solve the fragmentation problem plaguing every marketing team that serves lots of customers… we’ve got a problem.

But if we can solve it…There’s nothing* we can’t do.

Like smarter attribution, more accurate targeting and informed 1-to-1 marketing for starters.

*

That’s the end of our rant.Thanks for humoring us.

This tirade was brought to you by LiveRamp, an Acxiom company. We’re dedicated to connecting the marketing ecosystem.One of the main ways we do that is with something called Data Onboarding.But there’s lots more to come…So keep in touch.

You might like to read this next (I know we’d like you to read it anyway):

www.liveramp.com

Come and get it.

Data Onboarding: The 5-minute primerAn introduction for data-driven marketers