Interview with Silverpop

1) How has the rise of real time changed the marketing landscape?

Marketing has always been real-time to one degree or another. Store window displays, in-store sale racks and “blue-light specials” are nothing new. Marketers have always been trying to get in your face and make it personal, urgent, customized and “now.”

However, none of these tried-and-true methods are able to do what we can do with “real-time” data today. Real time today means the synthesis of several data sets—most never available before the advent of mobile computing devices—to produce something which is uniquely, but predictively, compelling for each and every consumer. It’s the logical extension of what we’ve called “dynamic content” or “dynamic personalization” in the past. The difference is that these new real-time methods rely far less on users’ self-reported data than previous marketing methods.

These new methods are reliant on gadgets for assistance. Now, real time means that you may be presented with a marketing message ONLY when you qualify AND are proximate to the offer. Don’t have your mobile phone with you? You won’t receive the offer—because the offer doesn’t work where your phone is.

Until recently, email marketing has utilized mostly “Bayesian” approaches to support content presentation decisions, relying on large data sets of older data, some immediately prior (like “clicked on this link in the last message”) and some fixed (like “self-reported to live in Atlanta”) to inform the content of a marketing message. Some of these Bayesian methods have been combined with “Nthing” approaches to test marketing hypotheses and then apply the winning formula to the rest of an audience.

What real time has done is reduced the value of self-reported user data compared to data that’s gathered in real time. Making marketing decisions based on what someone told you five years ago is going to reduce your probability of success. Making a marketing decision based on where I am now is probably going to work better.

2) What are some of the best practices marketers should keep in mind when foraying into the world of real-time advertising?

First off, start understanding your users’ mobile habits. Real-time and mobile are kissing cousins. Certainly there’s also a big market for real time on the traditional “lean-forward” platforms like desktop PCs and Laptops—specifically real-time bidding (RTB). Another best practice:  Don’t try to predict what device someone is going to open your message on.

3) What advantages and opportunities does access to an advertising exchange within email offer to today’s digital marketers?

Advertisers, specifically e-commerce companies, rely on email to drive traffic and sales. It’s worked well for them. However, most customers only open one out of 10 retail messages they’ve subscribed to.

Using an advertising exchange, retailers can take advantage of a channel that they’ve been using for centuries:  advertising next to news. Newspapers are a common method of retail advertising. Until now, it was neither operationally simple nor cost-effective for retailers to buy ad impressions in publishers’ newsletters like they already can in newspapers, magazines and Web display. LiveIntent is helping open up this market so that retail advertisers can run in “news”-focused newsletters. Consumers have a higher propensity to open and consume general news from publishers than they do a communication from a commercial entity.

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