customer data, whether it is anonymous or identified. Figure 1.3 depicts the addressability spectrum, in which anonymous individuals move to partially identified and identified status over time, as the customer relationship expands and data is being collected. And as both the level of knowledge and the level of identification increase, so does the value of the customer.
Figure 1.3 Addressability Spectrum
Ultimately, the objective is to drive as much content as possible to that most valuable quadrant, where you have as much information on an identified customer as possible. But even in the far right lower quadrant, you will see that, as long as you have individual-level data, you can still drive a lot of value from anonymous consumers.
What is enabling that coveted addressability at scale opportunity at the top of the funnel and continuing throughout the funnel, is the growing number and variety of digital audience platforms, which impact the entire funnel. There is an ecosystem in play (Figure 1.4), in which all the members are contributors and benefactors. The consumer wants the speed, relevance, and convenience of digital delivery. The marketer wants high-value customers and prospects. The publisher wants to monetize its audiences. And the platforms themselves are what facilitate the addressability at scale.
Figure 1.4 Addressability at Scale Ecosystem
Historically, marketing planning was focused on which publications would drive performance. As advertisers, the way we bought media was by studying syndicated research panels to determine our targeting demographics, then we went to media publishers to buy our spots, many weeks, even months, in advance. Today, because of digital addressability, our planning is audience based. Where we used to think of quarterly or even annual cycles, we're now using new technologies that are connected to large-scale publishers to carry out individual-level targeting in real time. It's less about the up-front plan and more about the ongoing optimization.
If we consider the marketplace and how addressability at scale has evolved from a media perspective, we might look back to the mid-1990s, when we had large audiences who either fit the broad demographics of our target audience, or they didn't see our advertisements (Figure 1.5). Then, in the mid-2000s, we moved to a more contextual, or cohort-based, digital marketing approach, where brands were aggregating audiences of specific interests, and we decided whether those were the interests of our customers or not. A few short years ago, we began to realize there would be value in anonymous customer data. So ad exchanges were developed, and we had the opportunity through those exchanges to use anonymous, individual-level data for targeting.
Figure 1.5 Evolving Platform Marketplace
Now, these audience platforms are creating the opportunity of individual-level targeting, whether anonymous, partially identified, or identified. We define an audience platform as a technology that enables automated, real-time delivery of targeted, personalized experiences to individuals (known and anonymous) at scale utilizing first-party data. One such platform is Facebook and Custom Audiences, where you can take an email address and send it to Facebook and match up to 170 million people in the United States. Another is Twitter, which has been moving forward from cookie-based toward addressable individual-level information as a connection point. Even Google is starting to move its search toward linking to advertisers' first-party data environment to make search ads perform better.
There are many different methods of addressable targeting, such as direct name-and-address match, real-time bidding in the exchanges, intent-based targeting through search platforms, or segment-based targeting coming from other social media companies. Most of these didn't even exist four years ago. The change is happening fast. Most of the different types of digital audience platforms and addressable targeting opportunities didn't exist at all, even four years ago.
And it's happening across devices – PC, mobile, and tablet. It's also happening in search. Many of our clients think of search and say, “Oh, we've been in that space for many years; our plan is working well there.” But there has been so much movement in search that they missed while their programs were on auto-pilot. It moved from traditional keyword targeting into different device-based search. And the format is diversifying to include features like video ads and click-to-call. It's now moving into integrated media and targeting, where you can actually load the data that you're collecting back into the platform and begin bidding on media that you would never have in the past, because you now have insights about those consumers.
New audience platforms have begun to arise from unexpected publishers (Figure 1.6). Amazon is now in the space, building a media business that has already reached the $1 billion mark.12 Even Walmart has recently entered the media business, debuting its own digital marketing platform. And this phenomenon will continue to expand as more and more companies gain these very valuable first-party data assets and look for ways to create new monetization streams. It's just going to increase the opportunity for us all.
Figure 1.6 The Audience Platforms
To illustrate how dramatically the marketplace is changing, we only need to think back a couple of years. Merkle works with many of the major addressable audience platforms, and we used to suggest that we take their user profile data and combine it with our clients' first- and third-party personally identifiable information (PII). We knew the tremendous potential of analyzing the combined data to determine its value for more robust targeting. The idea met with great resistance from these publishers, who weren't ready to loosen control on their profile data.
But here we are today, with rapid proliferation of addressability, and the use of first-party data on these platforms is the fastest-growing piece of their media business. We're also seeing the rapid build-out of highly integrated tech stacks that enable a lot of this addressability within the publisher platforms. As excited as we were about the prospect of bringing this data together, nobody could have predicted how quickly it would evolve or how broadly it would proliferate.
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