5 Takeaways from the AAMP Lunch and Learn on Audience Tech Stacks:
Last week we had the pleasure of sponsoring the AAMP Lunch & Learn at the Virgin Hotel in Chicago. Over 40 industry professionals braved the rain to listen to David Newcorn, SVP of Digital & Data at PMMI Media Group, discuss his journey for the past 15 years on how they built their audience tech stack; where they started, where they are now, and lessons learned along the way. David also shared several ideas that he believes can help rejuvenate audience marketing and improve your audience data.
Here are some of the key takeaways we found most intriguing:
1 – One question held some weight for David as he attempted to architect the audience tech stack at PMMI: What business are you in, the audience data infrastructure business or the media business? Seven years ago, David would have answered a resounding, Both!, and I don’t think he’s alone in that assessment, though at times it seemed as though PMMI was swimming against the current as they first brought their print audience database in house and used an ESP as their sole digital audience database. Though the resulting tech infrastructure had several benefits for PMMI, namely it’s low price tag, David found that the labor toll inherent in creating and managing their internal print database and syncing that data with an ESP that catered to marketers not publishers had a high cost all its own. After several years working within a structure that seemed to be working against him, David had to ask himself again, what business am I in? The answer this time led David back to Omeda and allowed David and his team to pursue new techniques and enhancements to their audience data, rather than eternally wrestling with where and how it’s stored.
2 – One of David’s key pursuits is to clean up bad data. Like a slasher in a horror movie, bad data is always lurking just out of sight, but if you take a look – really take a look! – at the data itself, you may be able to identify countless inconsistencies and wholesale in accuracies in the self-reported data you’ve collected. To combat this, David’s attention has turned to the great advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Though the technology (and cost) is not yet where it needs to be, David has begun collecting company urls and natural language answers to demographic questions so when these tools are available, he’ll be able to hit the ground running and he suggests you do too.
3 – Even if you can be assured that the data you have is reasonably accurate, David makes a valid point that in order to be useful to your advertisers, your data must be unique. Now, more than ever, advertisers are able to access demographics from a variety of sources like Zoominfo, Dun and Bradstreet, and can even access a B2B audience directly from their martech software. Publishers must collect demographics that set them apart from other sources in addition to the more generic Business Type and Job Title questions. He argues that though it will cost more to acquire more data, it will help you maintain your relevance with your advertisers by providing them something that no one else can.
4 – Along with this point, some in the audience seemed especially interested in utilizing Omeda’s progressive profiling and personalization tool to gather additional demographics without over-burdening their web forms or increasing their telemarketing costs. It’s worth noting that you can use our progressive profiling tool on your webforms to group these more specific demographic questions and display only a limited number, while always displaying your core demographics. Expect a future blog post discussing how you might be able to leverage progressive profiling within your Personalization modals!
5 – Alongside your digital marketing efforts, David suggests that marketing strategies that may seem old fashioned, like direct mail, could help to target key audience members. Use personalization on your cover wraps and start collecting mobile permissioning so you can begin to target your audience via SMS, as well. Marketing automation is more than just email and we hope to make both features available to you soon within our Marketing Automation tool, Odyssey.
Thanks again to David Newcorn for sharing his time, experience and valuable ideas with us! Please let us know if you have used, or plan on using, any of David’s suggestions and feel free to share ideas of your own by emailing clientsuccess@omeda.com.
