As consumer behaviour continues to evolve, so do the opportunities and challenges for today’s marketers. Consumers who used to be easy to reach are now much more challenging to connect with in a consistent, contextually relevant, privacy-compliant manner – particularly online. The average time spent with digital media is increasing year on year* across diverse platforms, with smartphones seeing the biggest jump in time spent by users, rising from 2.42 hours to almost three hours. Social platforms and direct messaging, music streaming, TV streaming, gaming, online news platforms and podcasts have also seen increases.

In this environment, true business results are difficult signals to extract from the noise.

With consumer habits becoming increasingly digital and fragmented, and a defined knowledge gap, marketers are working harder than ever to optimise their investments, reach their desired audience, and drive performance across channels and formats.

Marketers are looking to technology companies, including demand-side platforms (DSPs) to help find the more effective ways to engage with these audiences. But DSPs alone are not enough to solve modern-day advertising challenges. More importantly, those who look at these tools in isolation risk commoditisation.

As a result of these shifts, the tools in the marketer’s virtual tool belt must expand. They need customised tools, rich and diverse access to supply, plus curation technology to manage partnerships and a diverse set of solutions to maximise and measure reach and engagement.

Today’s marketers should consider a partner that goes beyond a single-point solution and meets their needs more holistically – an end-to-end ecosystem that meets consumers across screens and moments.

A customisable platform - not media vending machines

Marketers have invested in deeply understanding their customers while developing powerful relationships with content owners. Now, it’s critical that they’re able to unlock that value through highly customised yet powerful digital applications.

However, many DSPs operate like media vending machines and are not the sophisticated and flexible technology platforms marketers need. DSPs offer “one-size-fits-most” capabilities. This means that no matter how well you know your consumer, you’re not able to customise based on that insight.

For example, a whitepaper from Forrester Consulting commissioned by Microsoft found a new trend that has emerged from the pandemic: the ‘work from anywhere’ phenomenon, where boundaries between work and personal life have blurred, has produced a new consumer persona - the ‘workday consumer’, two thirds of whom buy products and services during worktime.

It means that marketers need to adapt their online advertising strategies and data insights to capture this valuable new audience but many are stuck with outdated persona strategies and require the right combination of digital advertising tactics to reach those personas.

Marketers have responded, the report found, by using multiple DSPs - with 82 per cent using two or more DSPs, and 77 per cent planning to engage three or more DSPs. This approach, however, will only get you so far.

Advertising investments can work harder for marketers. An open platform with robust features that can be tailored to operate in a highly bespoke fashion should be the standard.

Supply-chain insight and greater control

Supply-chain fragmentation and declining transparency across intermediaries have made it difficult to reliably find target audiences. These factors have also confounded efforts to determine the real impact of marketing on business outcomes. Marketers are deferring responsibility for digital ad dollars and where they end up to agencies, while agencies are deferring to their DSPs, with all lacking the knowledge to verify digital spend, according to an Australian Association of National Advertisers and Method Media Intelligence report. As a result, the industry has returned to its roots, re-establishing direct connections between buyers and sellers.

Technology partners that foster a direct connection empower marketers with greater control, improved supply-chain transparency, optimised audience reach and discrepancy-free buying with no hidden tech fees. Simply put, this means more of the marketer’s dollar goes towards working media.

Ultimately, a platform that reduces intermediary margin capture, zeroes out discrepancies and maximises addressable audiences improves business results. It also increases content owners’ revenue and creates a more virtuous cycle.

A resource for navigating identity complexity

With the decline of third-party cookies and the evolution of privacy regulations, activating and measuring against digital media is more challenging than ever.

Several alternatives have emerged, such as new industry IDs, contextual targeting and working with publishers to reach their first-party audiences. Each option has its own merits, but rather than selecting just one, marketers should use a blended approach.

One way to mitigate the identity challenge effectively is the recent innovation of curation technology, which is gaining rapid adoption across sophisticated buyers and sellers. Curation enables a variety of audience and supply tactics, inclusive of measurement and billing, to be packaged into a single deal ID and shared with a buyer.

For example, publishers’ first-party data private marketplaces (PMPs) can be incorporated into a curated marketplace, along with semantic contextual targets. That means marketers can blend inventory, which allows them to reach a relevant audience in a single package.

Curation technology ensures buyers benefit from scaled identity solutions, regardless of whether they choose to operate the curated marketplace themselves or simply buy the curated deal off the shelf from a curator.

Moving beyond a standalone DSP

The pain points of marketers are the same worldwide – attribution of marketing performance to channels, creating a single view of the customer with other marketing channels, personalisation of experiences and balancing privacy requirements, the Forrester report finds.

What marketers all want is an improved customer experience, satisfaction and loyalty, and the ability to target new consumer personas - such as the Workday Consumer.

By moving beyond a standalone DSP and working with a tech partner invested in the entire supply chain, marketers can fully unlock the value of their investments in their target consumers.

Source: *eMarketer Insider Intelligence H1 2021 vs H2 2022