Zaius

Additionally, the opportunity cost of fragmented data is too significant to leave unaddressed. For example, email is often measured simply on the success of turning opens and clicks into conversions. Email interactions may be inputs to conversion but they are also valuable inputs to an individual’s brand engagement, which can be used to determine retargeting spend against that individual. If they’re opening a lot of my emails, I should consider "retargeting" them with email, not with ad buying. Our understanding of customer behaviors and attributes must be as holistic as possible. This will either happen by pushing all of our customer data everywhere— which is not sustainable—or by managing the understanding of customer data centrally, and pushing the needed information easily into the ecosystem. Today, some advanced CTOs have managed to architect complex systems that do just that, but it should be easier, and should be ultimately managed and controlled by the marketer.

In response, marketing technology vendors should be empowering marketers to manage the flow of customer data into each solution rather than starting at a point of fragmentation. Facebook and Google have emphasized this need by launching Facebook Custom Audiences and Google Customer Match. These features allow marketers to leverage valuable segments of their customers (loyalists, churned, category X buyers, email openers) by targeting advertising to those customers specifically, finding others like them, or choosing not to spend on those segments at all. In launching these capabilities, they've made clear their understanding that when advertisers are able to leverage their customer data to drive ad targeting it’s more effective, and in turn they’re more likely to continue to invest ad dollars.

Now more than ever, each marketing solution must work within an ecosystem of solutions. When looking at new technology as a CTO, I look for things like APIs, marketer-ready integrations, partners and how they view “your customer data.” These are clues to help understand how they currently do, and plan to, play within the ecosystem of marketing. I believe that marketers should be able to quickly turn solutions on and off without friction and connect new solutions without having to depend on IT, so I advocate for technology that helps us realize that vision. There will always be best-of-breed capabilities, new channels of communication and seismic shifts in the landscape. Consequently, solutions that do not embrace the ecosystem are doing a disservice to their customers by stifling innovation in the landscape, productivity of the marketer, and experience for the end customers.