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For the past decade, most enterprises have focused on scaling and modernizing their martech and digital experience (DX) stacks, pushing ever-richer content and experiences through web content management (WCM) systems, marketing automation/ESP platforms, and CRM environments, among others. This made sense for improving digital customer engagement in those platforms, but also led to serious challenges that now need attention.

When you apply personalization to your website, and customize media assets for social networks, and then deliver special offers via email, you’re effectively customizing experiences within each channel, but potentially confusing your customers. On the surface, it appears like you’re engaging smarter, but in practice, your just creating isolated silos of customer engagement.

The result is that customers engage with you differently across channels, at a time when brands like Netflix and Amazon have trained them to expect a more coherent, omnichannel experience.

What’s a martech leader to do? Clearly it starts by taking a more customer-centric approach, perhaps involving voice-of-the-customer initiatives and more attention paid to true customer analytics. But you need to evolve your tech stack as well. Here is how stack owners can adjust.

From top-heavy to bottom-heavy

Your investments in WCM, marketing automation and social engagement technologies were not made in vain. But now it’s time to take a more enterprise-wide approach that will redirect investments lower in your stack. Going forward it will matter less what you do within channels and more what you do across channels.

To do that, you’re going to need to rethink your stack and move from martech to enterprise-wide CX.

Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack Reference Model.  Note especially the critical services in the lower “Enterprise Foundation” layer.

In particular, you’ll want to explore four key solutions for supporting the enterprise-wide customer experience. Critically, each of these platforms lives underneath your existing customer engagement solutions and ideally will serve them all independently.

1. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), a single, unified datamart of extended attributes and segments that marketing and engagement platforms need to engage intelligently with individual prospects and customers
2. Journey Orchestration Engines (JOEs), to serve as a kind of traffic management system, gathering information on real customer journeys across enterprise touchpoints, and directing how and where they should be treated going forward – regardless of channel
3. Omnichannel Content Platforms, to support a single source of the truth for re-usable content that you can confidently and consistently syndicate across all your customer and prospect touchpoints
4. Omnichannel Operations Hubs, to support internal collaboration across business units, creating the right assets, coordinating the right campaigns, and measuring outcomes across channels

Key technology buyer considerations

Based on my company’s experience working with large enterprises using these platforms, we can generalize about three key considerations for technology customers.

1. These are highly fragmented marketplaces

If your enterprise is exploring omnichannel tools to deploy enterprise-wide, the good news is that you’ll encounter almost an embarrassment of supplier choices. The bad news is that your team may struggle to differentiate among them — though once you get beneath the covers, you’ll see stark contrasts in terms of architectures, performance levels, use-case emphasis, pricing models and geographic footprint.

The Customer Data Platform Market is highly fragmented…and still growing.

How’s a customer to choose? We always recommend taking a business-focused, use case-based approach. Across nine archetypal CDP use cases, the typical vendor only excels at three or four, so prioritization becomes extremely important here.

Like most marketplaces, you have a choice between large CX and marketing cloud suppliers, and a number of (typically newer, more focused, but smaller) pure-play vendors. Which brings me to…

2. You shouldn’t default to old-line suite vendors

Chances are, your enterprise already licenses some technology from at least one of the big martech “suite” vendors: Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM (albeit selling these tools to HCL and Centerbridge).

These vendors focus very much on customer-facing engagement systems and have invested heavily in ramping up those toolsets. Unfortunately, they have arrived somewhat late to the party in terms of providing lower-level omnichannel capabilities, which arguably would erode the value of some of their beefy (but silo-bound) engagement platforms. So my advice to you: don’t default to martech suite vendors as you look to develop enterprise-wide services. In fact, consider this an opportunity to reduce your level of investment in these platforms as you build services lower in your stack.

3. Carefully create boundaries and test before you buy

Vendors always push boundaries with their tools – e.g., building a CDP into a JOE, or saying that their WCM platform is really an omnichannel content platform (hint: it’s not). To some extent vendors are following desires among customers for more bundled services. But I think you should resist that temptation.

The smart omnichannel stack owner will carefully create service boundaries to avoid unnecessary overlaps and attendant employee and customer confusion. Focus on what a vendor does really well, not what they say they can do in aggregate. The best way to discover the truth is to test thoroughly before you buy any technology.

From here to there

I don’t know any firm that has yet built a true omnichannel stack….yet. The key thing is to make a plan and start transitioning. Hopefully you find the reference model diagram useful to your enterprise, but of course, the transition from martech to CX is more than just a technical challenge. RSG’s Stack Leadership Council is evolving some approaches to governance and operations in this new world. I look forward to sharing those lessons.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Having data is no longer a problem these days. There are myriad tools that measure countless metrics out there.

According to Copyblogger, Google Analytics alone has over 150 default metrics, which can be explored with over 100 dimensions. And that’s excluding advanced functions. If we are being honest, that’s overkill for most people.

What on earth can you do with all those stats? Truth be told, all they give you is a migraine because they’re complicated to track, let alone analyze.

Here’s the thing. Marketers are choking under an avalanche of data. The real challenge today is sifting through the bazillion metrics and boiling them down to essential ROI-based numbers. What if I told you there’s a tool that cuts through all the data noise, ignores vanity metrics, and focuses on numbers that matter?

Enter Finteza, an exciting new tool in the martech space.

Finteza is an advanced comprehensive analytics tool that tracks and analyzes traffic, funnels, conversions, landing pages, and advertising campaigns.

This post is sponsored by Finteza.

Here are five things you can do with this agile tool

1. Analyze incoming traffic in real-time

Data sampling can mislead you.

It skews results especially if your traffic is dynamic. Distorted data inevitably leads to wrong conclusions and a wayward strategy.

What you need is real-time data, not sampling.

With this software, you get real-time data and adjust your strategy on the fly in response to what your users are doing. You get massively detailed statistics on every traffic source so you take the guesswork out of your strategy.

One unique feature is the program’s ability to measure traffic quality and present the info in an easy-to-understand, color-coded way.

Green represents quality traffic that includes live users while yellow is poor traffic from proxy servers, VPNs and so on, red is useless spam traffic.

2. Create and manage targeted advertising campaigns

Let me guess. You often struggle to create targeted marketing campaigns.

Not anymore.

This tool makes hyper-targeting a breeze. You get plenty of options to help you configure and target campaigns depending on your goals.

For starters, you can run banner ads or landing pages in several languages, and the system will automatically determine the user’s language and show the relevant message.

You can create and manage multiple campaigns for any website or mobile app and quickly pull out in-depth reports and stats. With Finteza, you can also set various conversion goals and launch marketing campaigns targeting users who have or have not performed a certain action.

The system supports GIF, PNG, JPG, HTML5, and responsive ad blocks.

3. Optimize your funnel from top to bottom

Who needs an elaborate 12-step guide on how to set up a funnel when you can do it automatically without breaking a sweat?

Besides, who does manual configuration in a tech world? Even online soccer match commentaries have got heat maps nowadays.

Imagine seeing a detailed breakdown of your conversion funnel from sign-up to the sale.

• UTM-marked traffic: Shows numbers for different sources like banner ads or purchased traffic.
• Traffic sources: Instantly tell what’s converting best, search, social, direct or referral traffic?
• Referrers: Conversions from domains with links to your site.
• Registrations: See how many prospects are signing up for your incentive at the top of your funnel.

You can create a funnel from scratch and have all the crucial stats at your fingertips.

With all these numbers, you’ll easily identify conversion loss points in your conversion funnel, plug the gaps, and increase profits.

4. Optimize landing pages for maximum conversions

If you are a marketer, you know landing pages are a crucial part of your inbound strategy.

Getting traffic to those pages is expensive. So make sure you fine-tune them so you can maximize returns on the money spent on buying traffic.

That’s easy with a platform that:

• Displays devices, operating systems, and user agents’ numbers.
• Channels, referrers, and UTM-based traffic.
• Shows you how visitors from different countries are converting.
• Reveals any bot traffic that’s converting.

That’s exactly what Finteza gives you.

Landing page optimization improves efficiency and stretches your advertising budget.

5. Track users across devices

Users switch devices many times on any day.

One moment they’re working on their desktop, the next moment they’re chatting on their smartphone. Then they jump to a laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA).

According to Statista, by 2020, the average person will own almost seven devices.

What does this mean? Follow prospects everywhere and see what they’re up to so you market better to them.

Without a cross-device channel analytics solution, you won’t win. Finteza gives your brand agile, cross-device, end-to-end analytics so you know exactly what your customers are doing regardless of the device they’re using. This data empowers you to provide a seamless and unified experience.

On top of it all, the platform has a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate. Every item is clickable.

Plus, the set-up is quick and easy. Once you’ve registered, all it takes is one click from your CMS control panel and you’re good to go.

How about integrations?

Are you concerned if the tool is compatible with your favorite tools?

Relax. You don’t have to forgo your darling tools because you’ve opted for Finteza.

The software integrates with all of the most popular content management systems and ecommerce platforms like:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• OpenCart
• And more

Happy now?

Want to give it a spin?

Leonardo da Vinci was right, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

What I like about Finteza is that it zeroes in on a few essential metrics. But it delves deep into them and generates fresh numbers from multiple angles so you can calculate your ROI accurately.

Plus, it’s easy to use.

Curious to see it in action? You can register for free now and track all your traffic and campaigns straight away.

Qhubekani Nyathi is a long-form content strategist. He is also a contributor to top blogs like Business 2 Community, Get Response, Crazy Egg, Conversion Sciences, and more.

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LinkedIn announced on Tuesday it has entered a deal to acquire Drawbridge, an identity resolution platform that uses AI and machine learning technology to provide marketing, customer experience and security solutions.

Why we should care

With the addition of Drawbridge’s technology, LinkedIn is aiming to boost ad engagement and ROI for marketers.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told Marketing Land that, when integrated into the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portfolio of products, Drawbridge’s technology will benefit advertisers in two specific ways:

• Improved reach via LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences and Audience Network campaigns.
• Better attribution, allowing advertisers to measure the results they’re generating from LinkedIn campaigns across channels and devices.

“Our data shows that mobile accounts for the majority of ad engagement yet most of our conversions happen on desktop. Drawbridge’s technology will help us better connect our mobile and desktop experiences,” said a LinkedIn spokesperson.

LinkedIn has been steadily building out its advertising offerings. Last July, it overhauled its Campaign Manager platform to deliver an objective-based workflow designed for high-volume campaign management. More recently, LinkedIn introduced lookalike targeting and enhanced its interest targeting advertising features .

More on the news

• LinkedIn said 78% of B2B marketers rate its platform as “the most effective” social network for achieving specific goals.
• The company is not releasing any financial details on the deal, and but a LinkedIn spokesperson said the specific integration plans will be more clearly defined once the deal closes.
• LinkedIn reports its Marketing Solutions platform has, “accelerated growth to 46% year-over-year in revenue.”

As digital advertisers, driving strong performance is at the heart of what we do. But, what is the true goal of paid search ad copy? If clicks, conversions, and demand generation are what is most imperative to client success and satisfaction, do you really need fresh ad copy to accomplish these goals?

At first glance, you might think, yes.

Forbes estimated that in 2017, Americans were exposed to 4,000 different forms of ads and brand messaging each day. With ads packed on top of each other, it can sometimes be difficult to fully capture user attention and interest. This idea leads some people to believe that they have to consistently develop and redevelop novel ad copy that breaks through the clutter. While it isn’t wrong to try and separate yourself from competitors within the marketplace, you don’t have to spend too much time creating niche variances in your copy.

Do users actually care about ad copy?

In this highly saturated ecommerce landscape, people aren’t going to spend time reading all of the specifics of your ad copy, regardless of how fascinating it might be. The average user only spends a couple of seconds navigating the SERP after typing in their query, meaning that they’re not going to actively take the time to read all three headlines as well as both description lines. In my experience as a consumer, when I type in a query, I scan the ad’s first two headlines, display URL, and site links before deciding whether or not to click.

To prove this theory of whether users truly care about the wording and actual detail within the ad copy, we ran an A/B test for one of our clients during a promotional period. From a high-level perspective, the test involved running evergreen ad copy versus promotion-driven ad copy across all of our branded trademark campaigns.

The results: Evergreen copy drove a 30% higher click-through rate

The outcomes we found were captivating. Our evergreen copy drove a 30% higher click-through rate over the course of the promo period, as well as a 19% lower cost per click. Ultimately, this decrease in CPC helped facilitate increased efficiency, saving us thousands of dollars. Evergreen copy also drove stronger back-end metrics, showing +2800bps in conversion rate versus our promotion copy.

With this being said, I’m not trying to say that it’s acceptable to get complacent with your copy development. I do believe that there are things you can apply to your ad copy that will help your ad stand out, drive relevance, increase quality score in the auction process, and ultimately drive increased traffic to the site.

Typically, strong PPC ads commonly contain features, benefits, and a strong call to action. The purpose of including these elements isn’t because they’re going to necessarily be heavily read or sifted through. It is merely to increase visibility, user experience, and ultimately get higher conversions for your clients.

The fight for SERP real estate isn’t won through compelling ad copy, but through relevance, quality score, and keyword inclusion. These elements convince the user that your ad will provide the solution to their query.

The answer isn’t easy

Incorporating this practice can hold many challenges, especially within an advertiser to client relationship. There are many times where a client pushes us to use copy that is either developed in-house, has a specific promotional message, or is nearly identical to the wording on their website. Sometimes these ad copy suggestions can be successful in increasing the quality score and relevance. But being an agency, it is our job to suggest running tests on different variations of ad copy that can potentially drive higher performance, especially since the window of time when users assess PPC ads is extremely small. At the end of the day, many brands will want to utilize whatever will drive the highest traffic, conversions, and demand across their accounts.

Focus not on wording, but on results

To summarize, ad copy is absolutely imperative for PPC success. But remember, users, are unlikely to take the time to read all of the intricacies included within each headline and description. Instead of spending time focusing solely on eloquent wording, it is important to suggest tests with your clients and ensure that you are having conversations about continuously optimizing your copy from a performance-based mindset. With this clutter-filled ecommerce marketplace, the essential benefits of ad copy lay in creating copy that will have a high-quality score and drive heavy clicks.

Nicolas Ross is an SEM Coordinator at PMG.

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One of my key takeaways from attending Martech West was that change management is no longer a dirty word. In addition, I see marketing operations in the unique position to lead explosive change that affects the fundamental role of marketing and the perception of marketing’s value to the firm. Key to this type of change is for marketing operations leadership to step up as the agent of change.

There are many characteristics of a change agent.  I’d like to highlight three that best describe successful marketing operations leadership. They include:

• Communicating compelling reasons for change
• Diversified knowledge
• Ownership and accountability

Communicating compelling reasons for change

Change-oriented marketing ops leaders are excellent communicators. The mere presence of a marketing operations team represents a change in how marketing functions. Leveraging this as a platform, effective change agents hone compelling reasons for change within marketing and with outside key stakeholders. The reasons for change are tailored to each audience and succinctly present why and how the change benefits each stakeholder.

For the marketing ops change agent, their compelling reasons for change are especially powerful as they are backed up and further influenced by data and on-going data analysis. This is a big change from the more traditional marketing decision-making processes based largely on gut instinct. It is very difficult to argue with data-informed changes.

An example of using data to inform and communicate change recently occurred with one of my customers. Before the arrival of a marketing ops leader, sales and marketing had constructed a lead scoring model based on gut feeling and intuition. You’ve seen this before. Sales and marketing get together and guess how many points to assign to certain kinds of digital behavior.

With the arrival of a new ops leader, one of her first goals was to make data-driven decisions, including lead scoring. After deep data analysis, she re-worked lead scoring and presented the new model at the next sales meeting. Disagreement quickly broke out but she was able to win them over once she showed data supporting the new model.

Diversified knowledge

Successful change agents bring and are continually exploring knowledge, best practices and new ideas from other areas. This certainly describes an effective marketing ops change agent who needs to have expertise in technology, data, marketing, operations, business, consulting, process mapping and the list goes on. This requirement of diversified knowledge is why we frequently refer to unicorns in describing what we need in marketing.

However, for the change-oriented marketing ops leader, having diversified knowledge is not enough. They must know how to weave together their diversified experience to create an outcome that is greater than the sum of the parts. After working with, talking to and interviewing hundreds of marketing ops leaders, it is their consulting skill that is essential to effectively using their diversified knowledge to effect change.

A few years ago I was working with an organization with a fairly new marketing ops function and leader. This marketing ops leader had a diverse background, including a stint in consulting. While having experience in tech, marketing and operations was important, he claimed his expertise in consulting affected the most change.

Why? Let’s look at the key characteristics of an effective consultant and see how that maps to being a change agent. First, this ops leader asked lots of questions and then shut up and listened to what people had to say. This behavior achieved two important elements of change. First, asking questions helped him gather critical information that informed what needed to change. Second, listening and interacting with all key stakeholders helped build relationships and advocacy for change.

Another key characteristic of an effective consultant is using diversified knowledge to create innovative solutions. One marketing ops manager I worked with used her diversified knowledge to create best practice services function for program and campaign managers and field managers. First, she baked into email and campaign templates best practices. As a marketer completed the template, they were driven to incorporate best practices. In addition, her team consulted with marketing peers on campaign performance improvement. In both cases, the diversified knowledge of marketing ops was a key input to changing campaign processes.

Ownership and accountability

A huge element of change management success is taking ownership and being accountable for change in the most transparent way possible. In other words, change agents are highly visible in what they are doing, how they are doing it and the results they are achieving. Being in this position can be scary and lonesome and may invite extra scrutiny and conflict. In situations with conflict, the ops leader must be able to demonstrate what they are doing is in the best interest of the business.

Change-oriented marketing ops leaders will look at all the changes that need to be made and then prioritize which changes will have the biggest impact on the business (this behavior represents change as well). Quite often, that change will be in the lead management process. Lead management is where the rubber meets the road for marketing. After all, the increasing martech investments are geared to create more qualified leads, that convert at a higher rate and that visibly demonstrate marketing’s contribution in financial terms. Taking visible ownership of this process and assuming accountability for an improved outcome is the hallmark of a change agent.

I was recently working with a global marketing team limping along in their MQL production and revenue results. They had a turn-over in marketing ops leadership and the new leader had both a tech and sales background. The first area she wanted to address was the very sticky issue of MQLs. Sales and marketing members were at odds with one another and her first approach to re-engineering the current lead management process soundly rebuffed. This marketing ops leader engaged sales leadership in a dialog around what she would do differently and how it would help sales. She also agreed to take ownership and accountability on her proposed process including having part of her variable compensation tied to the success of the new process. It was this attitude and action to accountability that won over the VP of sales so that the new process could be implemented.

Conclusion

Today’s marketing ops leadership has a choice. They can be reactive leaders that respond to business requests or they can be change agents that lead with new ideas, new innovations and new business models. We live in a digital world and digital transformation is all around us. This is why today’s marketing ops leaders have such an opportunity to lead and inform change, not just in marketing, but also in other parts of the organization.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Just when you thought Google was done shaking things up within their Google Ads platform, they did it again with their announcement that the “Average Position” metric would be sunset later this year.

Come September, we’ll have to start relying on the existing metrics “Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share” instead.

The change at first glance

It seems to simply and unnecessarily turn one metric into several, adding more complexity to the already vast data pool. However, the change is actually a chance to more accurately gauge the true page position of your text ads. The Average position has long been one of the most misunderstood metrics in the Google Ads ecosystem and can be a common source of confusion between client, agency, and Google teams.

Average position is going down

Average position is often interpreted as a metric that directly denotes the actual position your ad occupied on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), but that was never actually the case. Instead, average position denoted where your ad fell relative to other ads.

To illustrate the difference, consider that an ad with an average position of two could just as often be spotted sitting at the bottom of the results page as it could be found at the second overall results spot. The latter being in immediate view of a searcher without scrolling at all, the former often forgotten or dismissed.

In these two separate instances, the ad from Joybird is just as much in average position two as the JustFab ad in the next picture.

What are these “new” metrics?

“Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share” are actually much closer to the perceived intent of the average position.

Absolute Top Impression Share

“Absolute Top Impression Share” is defined as “the percentage of impressions your ad has in the very first position above organic search results”. This makes it ideal for knowing when your ad will be shown to a searcher without having to scroll. This is especially crucial when dealing with limited mobile real estate.

Top Impression Share

Meanwhile, “Top Impression Share” is defined as “the percentage of impressions your ad has above organic search results”. This will still be useful when gauging how your ad is being placed in relation to competitors.

While these new prominence metrics are a breath of fresh air, the jury is still out on just how reliable they are now and how reliable they will continue to be given the continuous testing of new page experiences and vertical-specific ad units (for example, hotel campaigns in Google Ads) along with other specialized knowledge panels.

Wake me up when September ends

With these “new” impression-share-based metrics taking center-stage in place of “Average Position”, there are plenty of misconceptions left to fuel more questions as time goes on, but the move should be fairly smooth given the ample amount of time we’ve been given to make the transition to using “Top Impression Share” and “Absolute Top Impression Share”.

With the wealth of data at our fingertips, now is the perfect time for search advertisers to educate themselves and their clients on the pitfalls of vanity metrics and the importance of focusing on clean, useful data that will actually improve returns.

Blake Lucas is an SEM Coordinator at PMG.

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Two running enthusiasts founded Nike in 1971 and created the first pair of Nike shoes using a waffle iron. Nike has come a long way since then – between the design of the signature swoosh, creation of the slogan “Just Do It” and endorsement from legends including Michael Jordan, the company has risen to a dynasty. One factor particularly contributed to Nike’s success: their repeated movement into new fitness markets in a specific, scalable way. Through targeting adjacent markets, Nike expanded its reach into new sports (mountaineering, for example) and sets of customers (like young athletes).

Just like Nike, many of the world’s largest companies, especially software companies, can accelerate their success through expansion into adjacent markets – but it’s a feat that requires a high degree of intelligent risk-taking. With research illustrating only three percent of software startups grow into companies boasting an annual revenue of at least one billion, it’s clear many struggle to make it past an initial “growth spurt.” Software companies can’t afford to stand still; they need to evolve by constantly moving into new markets.

To target adjacent markets successfully, high-tech marketers can’t lose sight of their companies’ original target market – but they do need to walk a fine line between risk-taking and staying true to their core audience. Here are three ways marketers can practice smart risk-taking into new adjacencies.

1. Identify the right moves through customer insights

With a surplus of emerging technologies coming onto the scene, marketers can face decision-paralysis when it comes to choosing which tools to incorporate into their business and new markets to pursue. Customer-centricity is key. Cutting through the noise of overwhelming choice and buzzword technologies means zeroing in on customer buyer and budget trends to understand exactly which markets to target.

Because metrics have become the lifeblood of marketing, modern measurement tools make it simple to gain consumer insight, analyze granular data and find common threads. You can also glean insight into what’s working through digital marketing methods like customer email surveys. Ask your most loyal customers to share feedback on what products would make their lives easier or ways you could boost the value of a current solution. Human-to-human methods of gaining feedback work well in tandem – through in-person focus groups, for example, you can bring together a mix of loyal and newer customers to discuss trends and collect valuable insights. Gathering customer opinions through both digital and in-person methods can help you make an informed choice on a new adjacency to target that will both power your current customers and let you enter new markets.

2. Be willing to let go

Once marketers determine which adjacency they’ll target, it’s usually time to hand the reins over to a leader who “speaks the language” of this new market. This means giving up ownership and providing autonomy to new leaders, as well as letting the initiative run unencumbered from the core of the business. If you force integration of the adjacency into your core business, it will simply wither on the vine. Treat your new market like a small but mighty startup, and give it the critical safe space it needs to grow and build momentum.

This also means letting go of the pressure to tie to the mainstream right away. Allow your new adjacency to play out in parallel or perhaps even in competition with your core market.

If you watch the work of an adjacent market at your company and catch yourself thinking “I don’t like what they’re doing,” that might be a good sign – it signals you’ve stepped out of your comfort zone and can allow positive change to occur. Moving away from what’s familiar means getting used to new metrics, too. For new market entry, rather than tracking revenue, metrics or pipeline, consider instead measuring quality and use cases you can share with the broader market.

3. Keep your eye on your core audience

Marketing to new adjacencies successfully means staying true to your core market while taking calculated risks. One way to ensure you don’t lose sight of your original consumer market is to target just one new adjacency at a time. Focusing on only one at first will enable you to provide ample resources to leaders and marketers of this new adjacency so they can execute like a startup while you simultaneously tend to your core market of customers.

In Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm” about marketing and selling high-tech products to mainstream customers, he covers the importance of starting small when it comes to targeting a new customer niche. He compares the initial phase of entering a new market to securing a beachhead in an invasion before you take a stand and build it from there. For example, Mark Zuckerberg built out Facebook’s marketing strategy by first starting small and targeting college students as primary consumers. Once he drove interest on campuses, he created enough of a presence to start expanding into other consumers across the world.

Successfully branching out into adjacent markets might mean making uncomfortable strategy shifts at first, but these changes will lead to the expansion of your core business. As long as you complete the transition to a new adjacency thoughtfully, your organization will reap the benefits – including an increase in consumer base, profit and brand awareness.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The landmark law created a unified, pan-European approach to privacy and data regulation. It was designed to protect EU citizens against non-consensual data collection by global tech companies and give individuals more control over their personal data. It also carries potentially severe penalties for violators.

Since being implemented last May, GDPR has impacted privacy debates around the world. It has also been an influence on California’s forthcoming CCPA, set to take effect next January. But has GDPR accomplished what it set out to do; is it working?

For perspective, we asked Johnny Ryan, chief policy and industry relations officer at Brave Software. A long-time privacy advocate and vocal critic of industry data-collection practices, he was substantially responsible for the recently announced Irish investigation into potentially improper exposure of personal data in Google’s programmatic platform.

We invited him to reflect on the impact of GDPR on the digital ecosystem and how it has changed the lives of marketers. Most of the changes Ryan expects have yet to take place, as he discusses in the interview below.

ML: What have been the most significant effects of GDPR on marketers and brands?

JR: Marketers are now controllers, even when they do not realize that they are. This exposes them to legal hazards, and will ultimately cause them to be more careful about the targeting that is used in their campaigns.  In June the European Union’s highest court ruled that marketers are responsible for how data is used in marketing campaigns — even if they never directly touch the data.

The European Court of Justice ruled that a marketer’s use of Facebook for advertising “gives Facebook the opportunity to place cookies on the computer or another device of a person visiting its fan page, whether or not that person has a Facebook account.” In addition, the Court observed that the marketer “can ask for — and thereby request the processing of — demographic data relating to its target audience” such as age, sex, relationships, occupation, lifestyles, areas of interest, purchases and online purchasing habits, and geographical data.” According to the Court, a marketer is therefore “a controller responsible for that processing.”

This applies to RTB: marketers are liable as “controllers” of the processing undertaken by the various adtech businesses involved in the RTB system on their behalf. RTB broadcasts personal data without security in hundreds of billions of bid requests every day. It is the most massive data breach ever recorded. Marketers now find themselves liable for it because of the adtech companies they or their agencies work with.

ML: What has changed in the day-to-day lives of marketers following GDPR?

JR: Most marketers are not aware of the risk that RTB companies expose them to. Otherwise, they would already have conducted data protection impact assessments (DPIAs), as required by Article 35 of the GDPR. DPIAs are required when AdTech is profiling and using intimate personal data (referred to as “special category personal data” in article 9) on a large scale to target people in the European market. The inescapable conclusion of any such assessment is that RTB is a “data protection free zone,” as The Economist indicated. This conclusion triggers Article 36 of the GDPR, requiring a marketer to alert a data protection regulator in an EU Member State about the risks it has uncovered.

ML: What changes have you observed in data collection practices?

JR: Change has yet to happen. As I told the Senate Judiciary Committee when I testified this week, we are at the very start of the application of the GDPR. But things are looking bleak for Google, Facebook, and the conventional RTB companies. They will be forced to reform.

ML: There seems to be a fair amount of non-compliance with GDPR. Why haven’t there been more fines or callouts of violators? 

JR: [This week] the Irish Data Protection Commission announced that it was launching a probe of Google DoubleClick/Authorized Buyers on suspicion of infringement. This, finally, marks the start of enforcement action that will force adtech to reform.

ML: Have there been any “unintended consequences” of GDPR? For example, some argue that it has strengthened the hand of dominant companies vs. smaller competitors. 

JR: First, let me dispel this idea that Google and Facebook benefit from the GDPR in the medium term. The GDPR is risk-based. That means Big Tech that creates big risks get big scrutiny and potentially big penalties. Regulators are only starting to enforce the GDPR and it will take years to have full effect. But already, things are looking bleak for our colleagues at Google and Facebook. Their year-over-year growth declined steadily in Europe since the GDPR – despite a buoyant advertising market.

They face multiple investigations and it is very likely that they will be forced to change how they do business. Google’s consent has already been ruled invalid. Yes, of course things are even bleaker for other tracking companies, that don’t have a search business to fall back on, as Google does.

Second, let me talk about the nonsense “consent” notices that currently despoil the Web. The IAB’s consent gambit was certainly an unintended consequence. However, these annoying and unlawful consent notices will become a rarity, if there is enforcement. Article 7 (3) of the GDPR  requires that an opt-in must be as easy to undo as it was to give in the first place, and that people can do so without detriment.

Once this is enforced, consent messages will become far less annoying in Europe – because if a company insists on harassing you to opt-in, and you finally click OK, it will be required to keep reminding you that you can opt back out again. In addition, most of the consent notices are for RTB companies whose processing is itself unlawful. So enforcement against Google and the IAB on RTB will prevent the majority of these notices.

ML: Finally, what does the experience of GDPR in Europe say about the implementation of CCPA in the US?

JR: Very little. Although its animating principles are noble, I think the CCPA is a pale imitation of the GDPR.

In a bid to entice digital TV marketers with more value and advertising opportunities, Roku introduced a new tool this week dubbed Activation Insights. The tool is designed to compare linear TV ads with potential OTT campaigns, giving advertisers visibility into the potential audiences they could be reaching on the streaming platform.

“Smart marketers are significantly increasing investments in OTT to reflect the dramatic shift to streaming,” said Scott Rosenberg,  SVP and GM of Roku’s Platform business. “By adding the ability to tie advertising performance on linear with a specific audience that advertisers can gain on OTT, we are addressing a long-standing industry challenge for OTT media planning.”

Why we should care

With the streaming landscape becoming increasingly fragmented as OTT platforms strive to keep pace with linear TV, digital marketing budgets are getting caught in the crossfire. Rosenberg said, “We believe it’s no longer a question of when advertising budgets will shift to streaming but how much.”

Tools that can help measure the reach and ROI of OTT campaigns are becoming more essential to marketers as they build out their media strategies and assign ad dollars.

Roku’s continued investment in its ad product underscores the race against competing platforms (like Amazon’s), but it’s important for advertisers to consider the long-term investment impact and health of the platform before taking the plunge. Factors like subscriber rates, screen share, viewing time and incremental revenue growth should be taken into account to determine the right amount of ad spend for the right type of streaming platform.

More on the news

• Activation Insights uses Roku’s first-party data from a reported 29.1 million active accounts to supply media planners with insights that can be helpful in allocating TV budgets and building campaigns.
• The tool lives under the larger umbrella of the Roku Ad Insights – an analytics suite meant to help advertisers identify and optimize campaign reach across linear TV and OTT.