Last week was America’s big marketing and advertising conference, Advertising Week, and no doubt that a lot of the buzz centered on the continued Russian ad scandal and Google’s YouTube mea culpa.
However, while those crises and respective responses are quite important to advertisers, it was the breakout panels where the significant issues that brands face day in and day out were discussed in detail.
Upwave CEO Chris Kelly had to opportunity to participate on the “Measuring Up” panel, a discussion with other industry experts about the challenges of measuring ad and marketing campaign performance at a time when available data and touch points are exploding. As Chris pointed out, the growth of smartphones may indeed contain a wealth of new information to analyze, but it also has made it more difficult to build attribution models. And inherently, the politics behind the companies that offer different data types and slices can muddle the true insights even more.
While advertisers and marketers are facing tremendous pressure to extract and fuse tactical data from the online and offline world, there are some more promising and immediate opportunities. The introduction of new and more innovative uses for location and geospatial data has opened the door for marketers to map the customer journey both in the digital and physical world, as highlighted by Chris’s co-panelist Antonio Tomarchio, CEO of Cuebiq. Antonio even alluded to the opportunities when you combine this data type with survey data.
Here at Upwave, we know firsthand about the power of understanding how customers interact with brands both online and in the physical world. As you may have seen, Upwave recently announced its Customer Research solution set, which included a partnership with geospatial data firm SafeGraph. Now brands can anonymously identify customers in store, and then survey them later on when they appear on the Upwave Publisher Network. This is in addition to our other solutions that get brands firsthand data from digital customers about any brand experience – including advertising campaigns.