After a comment on the past version of this blog post, noted from 2019, I realized it has been another 5 years and a rightful time to update perspectives on the integrated media landscape. First starting with the intentional use of the words “integrated media”.
As Acadia has grown as an agency, the ever-expanding landscape of clients has continued the expected trend of predictions from the past 5 years. Clients we serve are no longer as simple as the lenses of B2B or B2C, and “omnichannel” strategies are the new normal for many of our clients.
Admittedly “PPC strategies”, while a significant strategic base for capturing the bottom of the funnel user, aware and actively seeking your product or service, are only a portion of the puzzle. Moving forward, integrated media strategies that utilize online and offline data and signals are key to fueling and maintaining ever-shifting customer bases.
As Agencies became more aware of attribution, and which digital platforms contributed to what part of the journey of a user from awareness to purchase, we gained new knowledge and tools.
3rd Party data has become a norm in strategies utilizing signals from multiple devices, physical locations, browsing signals, research, and everyday behavior combined to provide a more intent-based audience on all platforms. Both programmatic and traditional media platforms now fully utilizing the thousands of AI-fueled signals to optimize media placements in real-time from search to shopping and from small screens to large. Google fully embraced this with Performance Max and enhanced bidding signals. Meta pushing its conversion API and Advantage+ Shopping campaigns.
An even wider range of 3rd party audience providers have emerged over the last 5 years supporting new targeting methods and augmenting traditional media platform data. While some of us knew the intent, recently Niantic, the company known for creating the mobile app and game Pokemon Go, announced that it has been quietly using data to train large-scale geospatial AI models. With abundant users, both Google and Apple map apps have also been collecting similar data to bring offline signals of location as well as proximity to other users and devices to help fuel real-world models. Privacy policies will continue to grow and adapt, but the truth is we live in a world where almost everything digital leaves some fingerprint.
While machine learning has made significant advancements, 1st party data analytics has become a key in fine-tuning the AI-driven data. Utilizing robust analytics from offline data can mean the difference between targeting everyone interested in your product or service in a broad way, to defining the difference between existing, new, lapsed, and potential customers.
“Pay per click” is a term that holds the fondness of the Ford Model T. It started a revolution in digital media. Integrated media is the supervised self-driving vehicle for the future, fueled by external and internal signals. While many 3rd party signals are now “black boxed” to ensure user privacy. Trust in those signals is greater than it has been in the past. First-party data now fueling the distinction between customers allows for greater creative insights into the right image and message for the right audience in the right moment.
Truly social, social media has helped to leverage the above signals and re-introduce the human factor with influencer content now driving decisions and product awareness more than ever before. From small to big brands, knowing the audience and opportunity is only as good as getting the word out and real people are helping to do just that. While we have yet to see the ultimate fate of the platform, “I found it on TikTok” has been an element of the platform's rising success. Brands are now looking at their media strategies not just with the lens of getting ads up, but one of building a brand and a genuine human connection.
As I look back on the closing statement of our 2019 blog post, despite large language models and the AI push to emulate and engage in interactions, I still agree and believe;
“At the core of it all is a human experience. Digital marketing agencies now have a growing and evolving set of tools to provide the best possible ad experiences in the right moment and when the job is done just right, the ads being served feel more like the advice of a trusted friend received in just the right moment”