By adaptive - March 28th, 2017
TUNE survey of marketers looks at four burning issues for the coming year. Susan Kuchinskas reports.
Mobile analytics and performance marketing platform TUNE asked ten marketing professionals about four issues that mobile advertising will face this year:
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Will this be the year for true multi-touch attribution?
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Will the mobile web or apps grow more in 2017?
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Should marketing technology and advertising technology converge?
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How should the industry handle ad fraud?
Coming to grips with the murk of multi-touch
TUNE asked whether the industry is ready for multi-touch attribution, in which marketers assign different value to channels based on their role in the buying journey. The consensus was that marketers need it -- and the most successful already have this nailed -- but it's extremely complicated.
"Ultimately, attribution is the referee that decides which channels and media sellers win and which don't," Janet Tran, global leader for mobile strategy at OpenTable, said in the report.
There's one huge problem: the money.
Pete Hamilton, CEO of TUNE, told OMM, "Publishers aren't ready to get paid less for the last touch, and marketers are not ready to pay more for the first touch and other engagements."
On the other hand, he noted, advertising and channel partners, notably Facebook and Google, believe they're not getting as much credit as they should for impacting audiences, especially when it comes to video's role in conversions.
"These large channels don't want to lose value of all the creative they're serving. They want to show its impact on the top and bottom of the funnel -- and eight or nine times on the middle," Hamilton said.
It may take a few of the world's largest marketers pressuring their channel partners to make this happen. While many trade organizations have attempted to take up the challenge, it never worked before, because the orgs were skewed toward one or the other side.
"Now," Hamilton said, "there are a few 300-pound gorillas on each side. If they could get momentum, they could make a change."
Web versus app
The mobile web vs. apps debate is far from over. While far more time is spent in-app these days, the mobile web remains important for many companies.
Layne Cox, head of growth and user acquisition at Ibotta, was quoted as saying, "To me, apps are all about loyalty and usage, while the mobile web is about experience and impulse."
Hamilton told OMM, "It makes sense that the top of the marketing funnel should be integrated with web, where people are bouncing form one thing to another quickly. When they want to commit more to that channel, source, brand or publisher, they will download the app. Both are critically important for business in terms of servicing customers that want to spend time with their products, while taking full advantage of the discoverability that the web provides."
A move from martech to revtech
One of the questions TUNE asked marketers was whether marketing and advertising should be run from the same consumer database. Not surprisingly, they all agreed; after all, this unified view of the customer has been something marketers and vendors have been working toward for years.
If this were achievable, Liz Miller, SVP of marketing for the CMO Council, said it would allow for the creation of a new kind of technology stack she called the "revtech stack." Miller was not looking for a unified product, she said, but rather for an open system that would allow marketers to use what it considered best-of-class software products that all would integrate with the company's preferred martech system.
Hamilton noted that the main requirements for a database that could be used for marketing automation and CRM are that there's a single, device- and platform-agnostic concept of a customer, and that each record must be able to register a click or impression event from third parties.
Ad fraud
The marketers agreed that marketers and ad partners needed a shared view of they need a shared view of full transparency of fraudulent activity, so that they can blacklist sources for fraud. TUNE's report noted that analyzing the results of marketing activities in terms of revenue, rather than of impressions or clicks, makes it easier to avoid paying for fraudulent activity.