Marketers are from Mars, advertisers are from Venus

While the battle between IT and marketing has been raging virtually since the invention of the computer, a new offensive has opened up between advertising and marketing professionals which is threatening to wreak havoc with consumers’ brand experiences.
So says Adobe’s latest Digital Trends Report, which polled over 12,500 industry professionals, and shows the two parties are not only on a different page; they are on different planets.
It reveals that advertisers are predominantly focused on immediate and tangible results, with nearly half (46%) prioritising ROI, followed by audience targeting (42%) and channel efficiency (40%).
The report says all of these point to a strategy that prioritises immediate and tangible results. This is despite the fact that nearly a quarter (23%) stated that the most exciting opportunity for 2019 was data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual first.
Marketers, meanwhile, are more focused on building loyalty and lasting customer relationships. Two-thirds (64%) stated that content and experience management is a top priority – compared to less than half of advertisers.
With significantly different priorities existing within brands when it comes to building customer experience, the report points towards a need for marketing and advertising professionals to integrate their strategies to ensure consumers receive a unified brand experience.
Of course, this is where Adobe’s systems come in very handy apparently…
Adobe EMEA Advertising Cloud managing director Philip Duffield said: “Advertisers and marketers are working towards the same goal, but they’re treading different paths in order to reach the end destination. The risk is that by pursuing two very different strategies, one rooted in creating a connection and the other in data, is that the end customer receives a very fragmented, and inconsistent brand experience. Both strategies have merit, but to be turbocharged they need to be integrated. The report outlines how customer experience management can unify advertisers and marketers to build brand in the longer term.”
eBay’s EU director of advertising sales Mike Klinkhammer said: “Creativity and metrics are connected. We need to focus much more on quality and relevance – those are two key words for me this year. If you combine quality and relevance, helped by automation, you get very powerful content delivered in very effective ways.”
Of those surveyed, companies which were focused upon building long-term customer experience were the most successful and were almost three times more likely than their peers to surpass their business goals.
With this in mind, Adobe’s Digital Trends report points to a need for advertising and marketing teams to unite on the customer experience front by bringing together rich audience data and insights, align this with their ad targeting strategies, while ensuring the creative connection with the audience is maintained.
Duffield concluded: “The race to personalise customer experiences has seen brands rely more heavily on analytics and programmatic strategies. And whilst these are so important, the opportunity facing the industry is how to balance these with creativity. Those who can root campaigns in deep audience intelligence and marry them with engaging real-time content delivered across the right channels, will achieve relevance and personalisation at scale.”

TOPICS:adobe data-driven marketing