The digital team atL.A. Inc had the opportunity to attend the DMTO18 (DataMarketing Toronto Conference) – a 2-day event that included over 1000marketing, analytics and customer intelligence decision makers, expert panels,keynote speakers from leadingcompanies and brands.
Here are somehighlights and key takeaways we discovered there.
Highlight #1: Humans vs Artificial Intelligence
Now, this topic may scare a lot of marketers into thinkingthat computers are taking over their industry, their jobs… but that’s not thecase. Computer and humans have been working alongside each other, albeitcomputers a little faster.
Listening to the panel at Converting Content Seminar, mostspeakers agreed that a blend of computer assisted technologies can go a longway in decreasing wait times and optimizing work flow, but human connection cannot be undermined, especiallywhen tact is required. Emotion, warmth and human touch are still an important part offostering great customer and client experiences. And that isn’t changing anytime soon.
What is surprisingis the influx of ethical questions in terms of disclosing to audiences, whenthey will be interacting with non-human entities. What is our duty as marketersin determining at what points of contact warrant a disclosure? Will it matter to the users iftheir customer services needs are addressed? This past year, General DataProtection Regulation (GDPR) compliance has been the forefront of digitalregulations. Essentially, GDPR compliance is placing the ownership of customerdata from the organization to the individual customer and with this comes morecontrol over storing private information.
In the grand scheme ofthings, these systems will provide better actionable insights via data andpattern processing and allow for mundane and repetitive tasks to be outsourced.These improvements can allow for better overall customer/client satisfaction,and that’s what we’re in it for.
The importance of using data through the assistance of A.I.is monumental – and it’s already on the rise – Canada’s annual programmaticadvertising spend was 1.09 billion U.S. Dollars in 2017.
PWC PREDICTS THAT AI (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE) WILL ADD $15.7 TRILLION TO GLOBAL GDP ANNUALLY BY 2030”.
Highlight #2: Personalization
Many clients often ask us, how can we get people to followus? How can we get better engagement on our social profiles and website? Theseare all important questions and the answers can be found within your audience.The panel at Converting Content, which included professionals from Erin Elofson(Pinterest) and Pau Cowan (Shutterstock) among others hit the nail on the head,‘Visual, Personal & Actionable’ content.
Content is king – we hear this a lot as marketers butsometimes the easiest advice can be the hardest to implement. Especially withthe fact that there are currently over 438 million blogs on the web today. Manyof which are a re-hashing of what’salready out there. Content marketing is a long game, especially from anROI standpoint – however it can reap many benefits especially when consideringthe alternative of high advertising costs.
Most consumers won’t even start the sales process unless they have interactedwith your brand from different touch points: social media, website and yourblog.
Your audience wants to receive valuable content that relates to them. The morethat you know about your audience, like who they are and what they do, thebetter you can target and influence your desired action.
Visually speaking, this is a no brainer. Especially as it relates to realestate, there is power in visuals. Over 80% of the population are visuallearners and most consumerswould rather watch a video on a product then read it.
The challenge however is to create content that is compellingenough to warrant action! Brands should be looking at every stage of theirfunnel, service offerings and overall strategy to fully assess why someoneshould care about their company.
Highlight #3 The Magic of Programmatic Advertising
We’ve all been there – getting inundated relentlessly by ads that aren’trelevant and provide no context to our daily lives. It is no secret that as marketers, we arealways trying to get our hands-on data, so this doesn’t happen.
A wise marketer once said, “a campaign is only as good as thedata you collect”. However,the magic happens in gathering these insights and applying it to systems thatremove human error. This is what makes programmatic advertising solucrative to marketers – it allows for increased efficiency all around.
This style of advertising uses AI technologies to assist withbetter budget decisions, gain insights from granular data and this is only the tip of theiceberg. The only challenge is that, out of the 90% of theworld’s data that was created last year, research shows only 1% has been usedeffectively. This is an opportunity for major growth and we think thesealmost sentient beings are up for it.
There is already great promise for ROI, as studies havespeculated that AI could increase productivity by up to 40% by 2035 and boostprofitability by 38%.
For digital marketersthat translates to better targeted campaigns – our clients can reap thebenefits of a lower cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition – a win win foreveryone.
There are other areasin which AI programmatic advertising is a boon: ad creative and customer &marketing insights. What can we look forward to? We predict marketers will continueto embrace these technologies and further improvements of the saidtechnologies.
Conclusion:
This year’s DMTO18 hada wide array of data analytics, governance, automation, AI and much more. It gaveus the opportunity to stay current in the market. And before you ask, no, a botdid not write this!
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