Marketing in the age of fragmentation

Scott Symonds
Source: Admap Magazine, October 2014
Downloaded from WARC

This article argues that data will become the primary currency of future marketing strategy and that
marketers should deploy data to create seamless brand experiences that function across all delivery
channels.

The key challenge facing marketers is creating a well-articulated brand in an age of massive
channel growth and fragmentation, likened to "CRM at scale".
Strategy changes because there is no longer one audience or message; media planning has to
deal with multiple channels driven by technology; and creative development has to adapt as well.
Emotional brand loyalty created by consistent, engaging advertising could be replaced by
mechanical loyalty to a brand through automated refill relationships from scaled e-commerce
providers like Amazon.
Data will provide a common currency and solution for marketers to navigate this new world;
marketers must distil it into usable information about consumers and their interactions with their
devices and environments.

Scott Symonds
AKQA

In an era when they're bombarded with choice and empowered with control, consumers must be
given increased relevancy and value. For marketers, it will be data, reduced to its most fundamental
elements and organised effectively, that will be the primary currency of future marketing strategy and
should be deployed to create seamless brand experiences that function fluidly across all delivery
channels.

This article is from the 50th anniversary issue of Admap, which looks ahead to the future of brand
communications.
All Admap articles are available exclusively on Warc.

Why are automakers flipping from product to service-based brands? How is technical loyalty replacing marketing
loyalty for packaged goods? Is the 'Big Idea' being replaced with a thousand more relevant ones? Today, the
future of media is more analogous to CRM at scale than broadcast. The rise of channel fragmentation, high-
fidelity data, and hyper consumer-centricity is changing the future of marketing.

Marketing has seen an explosion of channel fragmentation in the past few years. Even just in the digital arena,
desktop advertising – the main digital channel just a few years ago – has splintered into tablet, mobile, smart TV,
app, video, social, data, programmatic, native and more.

And the trend continues to accelerate with the addition of data streams from these extended channels.

Social media is creating a fire-hose of real-time consumer sentiment data, mobile is adding geolocation data,
beacons offer intra-store hyper-location data, e-commerce giants are merchandising their product purchase
data, activity-tracking wristbands are quantifying every personal movement, connected cars are beaming
telemetry data, and the Internet of Things will soon add data from your toothbrush and coffee pot to your
potential marketing data set.

There will be no 'rest break' for us marketers to catch our breath either. Pandora's Box has been opened. The
consumer is in charge and driving this change. People love Candy Crush, Shopkick, Nike FuelBands,
Facebook, Google Maps, Pandora, and Nest Thermostats too much to let up in their consumption and data
production.

The pace and consistency of digital media's growth are strong enough that it will surpass television as the
number one media channel by 2018. And consumer consumption patterns have almost certainly never been so
far ahead of a marketer's ability to consistently keep up.

Despite the rise of channel fragmentation and the surplus of data, some marketing constants remain and, in fact,
might be more important than ever. They are the value of a well-articulated and essence-distilled brand and a
strong understanding and alignment with the brand product's purpose and value to the consumer.

These issues are now more important than ever because now we can see the huge variation in types and
occasions of consumer interactions with brands. It will require that traditional marketing discipline approaches
supporting them through strategy, creative development, and media planning will have to go through significant
reinvention to respectfully address this new fidelity of understanding.

The legacy broadcast paradigm of 'push' messaging and 'lowest common denominator' shared experiences of
broad demographic groups is being replaced with micro-targeted audience buying and smartly sequenced ad
messaging against deep data insight into their behaviours and interests. Which means that now, the future of
marketing is more closely analogous to CRM at scale than broadcast.

Equally, this evolving 'CRM at scale' manifestation for the future of advertising also demands that we plan as
much for the 'pull' side of our consumer relationships as we do for the 'push' side in order to respect and
dimensionalise our now expanded understanding of the consumer. This means that we need to be just as
mindful of our 'owned media' or 'organic' strategy across branded website, search, and social content strategy,
development, and optimisation as we are of our 'paid' or 'push' media.

How are marketing disciplines impacted?

Strategy: There is no longer one target audience and one message. Now brand and product essence need to
be understood, distilled, and messaged at scale across multiple platforms and consumer segments to drive
greater relevancy for the consumer and reflect our appreciation for their attention (e.g. leaders, regulars, low
value, at risk, recent purchase, lapsed). Additionally, owned brand assets need to be planned and developed to
create the best combination of traffic volume, quality, and continuity with brand and product value positioning
and paid outbound marketing.

Media planning: Past constructs of channel planning and human direction and optimisation need to be
rethought. Channel fragmentation is accelerating vs. plateauing, target audience definitions are exploding with
data-enhanced fidelity, and we will have to deliver more relevance to the consumer across their lifetime of loyalty
to our brands in order to win and keep their attention. Media planning's future will be much more dependent on
technology, software, applied data science, and programmatic machine learning and optimisation against a
tirelessly consumer-centric focus.

Creative development: Similar to the impact on strategy and media planning, creative development needs to
prepare for an explosion of channels and messaging to reflect new modes of media and delivery, as well as
more sequenced relevance over the lifetime of a consumer relationship. Programmatic media will demand
programmatic creative. Programmatic creative will break down all relevant aspects of marketing assets and
messages into components, and dynamically assemble them in a few milliseconds, based on audience, channel,
context, message type, and any additional applied data available to refine targeting further.

Change in basic brand construct

Just as the rise of channel fragmentation and data is forcing us to rethink our legacy marketing discipline
approaches, it's also forcing brands to rethink classic constructs of marketing – or even what 'brand loyalty'
means looking forward.

Take a very traditional brand sector, such as packaged goods, for example. The traditional approach is for the
brand to advertise its values and features consistently to build an understanding with consumers over time,
through messaging and product use, that the product is superior and therefore deserves loyalty every time the
consumer goes to that aisle of the market to make that final decision. Marketing is an investment and core
component of brand differentiation perception to earn loyalty.

But now there are at least two major disrupting factors to that legacy construct.

First, the investment in brand messaging and loyalty was made as a continuity play to bridge the gaps of
consideration between purchase, use, and refill occasions. We had imperfect knowledge of consumer behaviour
within that cycle and invested across the gap to improve 'awareness', 'consideration', and 'intent to purchase'
against a future moment of purchase decision where we would not be present with media or tracking.

Now, we are moving very speedily towards having near-perfect knowledge (in comparison to what we had
previously) about what our consumer is doing. Large e-commerce providers, such as Amazon and Walmart, as
well as consumer data providers, such as BlueKai, Experian or MasterCard, tell us if the consumer buys our
brand or a competitor's, how often they buy, and when they are likely to purchase again.

We can target our consumer, knowing they are our consumer and using the appropriate messaging to increase
purchase frequency and build brand equity, or we can target our competitors with a compelling conquest offer to
try our brand. And we can do it not just when they are in the living room watching TV or reading, but we can
recognise them in-store on their mobile, even down to what aisle and product group they are standing exactly in
front of, at the moment of their final decision, providing anything from a personalised dynamically set discount to
product/ingredient differentiation reinforcement.

Second, rather than wait six to nine months to correlate our 'brand' ad impression investment against in-store
purchase, we get real-time correlation and quantified feedback from Amazon and Walmart.com for actual items
purchased. How will 'brand' advertising evolve when we have real-time purchase and RoI feedback?

Even as radical as the above might seem compared to legacy brand marketing constructs, there is the potential
for more radical technology and channel evolution to what 'brand loyalty' means. Emotional loyalty to a brand
earned through marketing and product use is now significantly threatened, to be replaced with mechanical
loyalty to a brand through automated refill relationships from scaled e-commerce providers such as Amazon and
Walmart. com.

A similar narrative redefining 'brand loyalty' is playing out in the automotive category as well. Technology and
data availability, combined with consumer empowerment through mobile access to that data and technology, has
redefined the millennial generation's attitude about car ownership. For the first time since the invention of the
car, interest in having a car is diminishing rather than growing among the newest audience of likely car buyers.

How does an automotive brand define itself in an era of declining interest? The answer is to redefine itself as a
service vs. a product. Taking the lessons of being channel-agnostic and consumer demand- defined, automotive
brands can redefine themselves by offering a fleet of their brand of cars on demand through mobile apps as a
service instead of offering only ownership or leasing as a revenue, loyalty, and brand relationship offering. In
fact, auto brands as a service can potentially offer even more consumer loyalty through delivering experience
and utility across all the models of a brand for satisfying different occasions of consumer need. And,
undoubtedly, they will deepen that relationship through the new communications channels afforded by that
relationship – not least of which will be smart data-personalised communications delivered through in-car apps.

Finding a common currency

So, what do we do if we believe that fragmentation is indeed accelerating and will genuinely force fundamental
changes in marketing approaches?

We believe that finding the solution to this fragmentation starts with finding a common currency across all the
existing and new channels. We believe that currency is data.

Data, when distilled into usable information about our consumers and their interactions with their devices and
environments, is the thread we can pull through our marketing strategies and across our consumers' devices to
create consistent and relevant experiences for them.

Some of the best evidence of this practice in action is built into successful newer businesses and products such
as Google Now, Amazon, Netflix, Pandora and Nest. All of these companies and/ or products use data, working
in the background and processed across channels with intelligent algorithms, to deliver simple, seamless
consumer experiences. For example:

Nest notes the time and temperature when the thermostat is turned up or down, notes when you are home
or away, and simply does the work to deliver a more comfortable home and a lower utility bill.
 Netflix notes the type and format of content you watch, how you rate it, who you share it with, when you
start and stop it, and delivers from that data a set of personalised programme recommendations to keep
you best entertained.

Both of these companies are successful primarily because they can process different sets of discrete data
intelligently to deliver a seamless consumer experience.

So how then do we apply the learnings from these data-fluent companies and products to the marketing needs
of our client brands?

We have found that the best way to consistently navigate the chaos of available data and multitude of channels
successfully is to focus obsessively on delivering increased relevance and value for our consumers. By making
our consumers' interest our North Star, we can much more easily separate signal from noise, ignore great
swathes of low-value data, and focus on enhancing and optimising the application of high-value data into
positive consumer experiences.

In this world, media channels and platforms don't make sense as the focus of your planning. Instead, the
consumer's best interests and the data's suggested next best engagement opportunity win the moment.

It's understandable to be bewildered by the fragmentation and choice within marketing that has been caused by
the explosion of consumer digital device usage today. It's likely to expand yet more tomorrow with the growth of
the Internet of Things.

Legacy channel-centric marketing approaches won't survive the transition from five to 5,000,000 channels. In an
era when they're bombarded with choice and empowered with control, consumers must be given increased
relevancy and value. Marketers, in turn, must use the data at their disposal to determine the best means and
places to spend their money and create consumer engagement.

Data, reduced to its most fundamental elements and organised effectively, will be the primary currency of future
marketing strategy and will be deployed to create seamless brand experiences that function fluidly across all
delivery channels.

Visit the Admap@50 page for more, including…

The future of the agency service model Social's future is not community
Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP Darika Ahrens, Grapevine Consulting

Creativity ain't what it used to be Build trust in a post-privacy era

James Hurman, Previously Unavailable Neil Dawson, SapientNitro

The end of dumb digital marketing The post-disruptive advertising era

Ben Wood, iProspect Gareth Kay, Zeus Jones

The future of insight gathering Programmatic: the risks and rewards

Eric Salama, Kantar Rob Norman, GroupM

The future of search The agile brand

Matthew Maltby, Google Lois Jacobs and Thomas Ordahl, Landor

About the Author

Scott Symonds is managing director, media, AKQA, leading the agency's global digital media, media technology,
and data science services including paid and organic search optimisation, digital media programming, and client
testing, tracking, and analytics.

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