A new year for marketers is off and running, and Bruce Biegel, senior managing director with Winterberry Group, sat down with Chief Marketer to talk about what marketing professionals can expect in the year ahead. From big data and technology to social media and audience targeting, Biegel gave us the lowdown on what to expect in 2015.
CHIEF MARKETER: What big trends in marketing have stood out in the past year?
BRUCE BIEGEL: Data has continued into its fourth or fifth year as a trend, and I think we’re seeing more maturity in the integration of online/offline data, and we’re seeing a ramp in both the onboarding of data as well as the implementation of DMPs. I think we’ve seen a continued push from omni-channel, which is now going into its third year. But I think the tools have gotten better and have outstripped the ability of the brands an their agencies to implement. So there is some structural realignment that needs to occur in 2015 so people can take advantage of what’s possible.
CM: How will marketers address these structural realignments?
BB: Anytime you go through a marketing tech change or any kind of process like this, people, process and platforms are the three keys. The talent doesn’t have the education that it 
needs to really take advantage of the technology. The processes, for the most part, are still single-channel, not omni-channel or multi-channel, so your customer journey maps, which are non-linear will need to realign process to the customer journey. That type of transformation is not easy. So we’ve got to get educated, realign processes, and then we can get the most out of technology.
CM: Where will marketers be directing their budgets in the year ahead?
BB: All of the digital channels are getting the money, but the real money is being put into display. When we think of display, that could be display on a mobile device or on a computer. We don’t think of mobile as a channel so much anymore, except when it comes to apps. If it’s email on a mobile device, that’s still email to me. If it’s video on a mobile device, it’s still video. Search is going to grow, but we’re starting to see that it’s harder to move the needle in big percentages when you get into the 25 billion-plus category. Most search is mobile device-driven and local-focused. Direct mail is going to do OK. The Post Office has filed for a two-percent increase on a CPI after expected it to be mostly flat, and that would go into effect at the end of April. So we will be four months into the year before we get a price increase. We’re thinking that there will be stability in the mail chain, but not great growth. Acquisition mail is still cutting through the clutter, and it still performs.
CM: Have marketers wrapped their heads around social media spending and what kinds of budgets to assign to it?
BB: They are definitely still putting more money against it, and they believe that it’s a critical component in the customer journey. They have not wrapped their head around measurement because measurement itself is a challenge on mobile devices and more social is being consumed on mobile than on desktops. I don’t think there’s an argument that it performs, but getting accurate ROI on social is a little bit more challenging. It’s a little bit easier when you’re thinking of social in terms of display, like Facebook or Twitter custom audiences. I think this year they have to sort out mobile attribution and measurement before they can sort out how effective the social spend is, because so much is mobile device related.
CM: Are marketers doing a better job of targeting relevant audiences?
BB: I think they’ve done a much better job in the display market of understanding who the audience is. We’ve seen a near tripling in the use of data in programmatic. As much programmatic adoption and real-time bidding has grown over the last 12 months, along with that growth came a significant increase in the use of data to focus the buy on audience more than context. That doesn’t mean that we still don’t have a lot of fraud and waste but it’s a more audience-focused buy, even if the measurement is still a challenge.
CM: Is personalization still gaining steam?
BB: That goes back to following the customer journey and being more customer-centric—not customer as a segment but customer as a one-to-one. If you can align the customer journey at the most granular level, you’re going to achieve personalization. In order to achieve that, you’ve got to integrate data from online and offline, and also add behavioral and geolocation data, because the consumer shops and travels all over the place. It’s the alignment of the customer journey to the targeting, and it’s utilizing data for both insight and targeting, but an integrated online/offline data set.
CM: Location-based data looks to be a hot topic in mobile; how will marketers be using location moving forward?
BB: We think beacons are going to be big. We are seeing adoption. Beacons are two-way—they’re not just one-way. So even if I’m not targeting someone right there, I’m collecting data about who comes in. Even no response is a response when it comes to data collection, and if I can collect data on them I can retarget them when they leave the store. It’s yet another set of data to integrate into the big marketing data cloud.
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