The tide is turning as technology continues to evolve at broadband speed and audience segments become more sophisticated. Identifying these profiled segments naturally becomes more challenging as media vehicles multiply and the battle for awareness escalates. This is not a new obstacle in digital marketing, even with the evolution of data analysis, market research, and technologically advanced distribution platforms. What we are faced with is a challenge of combining the right kind of solutions to the most significant problems: the bottlenecks and obstacles that prevent advertisers from maximizing efficiency. It would be worthwhile to explore these components and more importantly, exploring the actual recipe that creates an ideal solution.
What does it mean to have a complete digital communication solution in digital out-of-home and digital destination advertising? Our CEO, Steve, has always been intent on creating “Nirvana” for advertisers. This, to me, is the only way to build a product: executing with the kind of rigorous attitude that transforms industries by asking, “What’s wrong?” and “What can be done better?”
In the spirit of this inquisitive methodology, we asked those of who would benefit the most.
Several thought leaders in the space have coined our solution as being the “Holy Grail” of advertising. As flattering as this sounds, we didn’t stop at the first milestone and pat ourselves on the back. We knew that we had to dig deeper into the core elements of the solution and immediately ask how we can make it even better. This is why we have been meeting with key influencers and thought leaders in the space to arm ourselves with the intelligence to continuously evolve our platform.
We have received the kind of feedback we need to make Entourage an even more effective platform. We sat down with a dozen or so thought-leaders in the space: the innovators, influencers, movers, and shakers that know what it takes to create a great solutions, digital EVPs, head media directors, C-level network leaders with the drive and intelligence to get to the core of what this industry needs: a “jumpstart” something fresh to reinvigorate the industry in a meaningful way.
So far, according to thought leaders in the media and advertising industry, these are the elements that collectively create a complete platform:
- Robust, versatile, and dynamic technology
- Audience profiling and targeting intelligence
- The right information presented at the right time
- Metric variance against total audience
- Third-party research validation
- Comprehensive network profiling
- Intuitive campaign building process
When it comes to audience profiling, leveraging comprehensive, consistent, and useful marketing intelligence has always been somewhat elusive. There are many tools that exist that can help marketers identify silos (to break them) and entities that can drive business more efficiently: the Atlases and Experians of the world know what great media solution platforms need to be dynamic, consumer-oriented, fresh, and completely versatile.
A lot of it depends on the way a marketer wants to buy media, the way they want to build audience profiles, the way they want to identify the right media vehicles to reach that particular audience using metrics they know, or perhaps they have the intuition to reach the market they want — they should be able to use the same tool in a more meaningful way to achieve targeted visibility in a place where it matters most. Our audience profiling methodology makes sense for advertisers because they don’t need a major research company to tell them that certain venues are more valuable than others when reaching their market. Our profiling team does the heavy lifting by assessing each and every screen in a network to match the audience with the right media vehicle. But if third party validation is what they need for a media vehicle to get on the plan, then we provide that as well. We are working on incorporating the appropriate metric information throughout the campaign building process.
It all goes back to that fundamental principle of efficiency. What is the right combination of solutions? How do all of these components come together cohesively to help a marketer reach their objectives in the most effective way? At the end of the day, agencies want to serve their clients better. So networks have a responsibility to create, fuel, and facilitate the most effective solutions to execute campaigns.
This will drive the industry forward very quickly and what will elevate innovation and marketing savvy. This is intrinsic to building effective enterprise solutions incorporating fundamental attributes that make the planning and buying process more intuitive: a combination of stewardship and technologically advanced tools to eliminate the layer of inefficiency. This is what the influencers are asking for and this is what we are delivering as we evolve Entourage.
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