Why Advertisers Need a 4th Party to Manage Analytics Technology

As I speak to more and more advertisers, one discussion that keeps emerging is the role of the business intelligence technology companies in development, delivery and execution of marketing and advertising ROI systems. To understand the value of a 4th party involved in the management of marketing analytics, we first must look at all the players involved in the inputs and outputs of marketing ROI. Second, we must think through all the points of optimization that are currently underutilized since internal systems are not connected with external ones. By connecting the dots, advertisers can materially improve their ROI.

The way we think about it is for every brand a typical advertiser will have several internal teams and several external partners that need to plug into their marketing analytics. Internally, many marketing teams across a myriad of marketing disciplines (e.g., marcom, merchandising, etc.) should be involved in the creation and use of a marketing ROI system. Second the marcom and media teams should be specifically interested in plugging the marketing ROI system into their day-to-day partners: media and creative agencies. Lastly, as many advertisers outsource some of their marketing analytics work to third parties (e.g., mix-modeling consultants) these analytic partners must be able to publish new finding into the marketing organization.

With all these teams and members, handling this amount of variants of reporting and data management (who is allowed to see what) is a full-time job in and of itself. Advertiser analytic teams should be spending their time on identifying nuggets of insight to drive better optimization of advertising and marketing investments not on reporting management issues.
Which brings us to our second improvement for Advertisers that out-source their marketing ROI system: Supply-Chain alignment. Once developed, managing your KPIs throughout your marketing supply chain can materially improve your marketing ROI. Now all of the day-to-day activities across your agency and media partners are working towards the same set of goals. Each partner has the capability - and should be required - to optimize your marketing investment in the terms that you as the advertiser are measured against in near real-time.

Based upon what we have seen, this cross-company process improvement, as overseen by the advertiser, can improve marketing performance as much as 5%. This improvement is simply created by connect the dots across your marketing organization and each of their delivery partners.