Harness the power of artificial intelligence fueled by first-party data

Own paid channels, own the competition

Advertising consistently struggles to engage customers with relevant messages that are delivered when and where they’re likely to convert. Traditional advertising wasn’t built to engage individual customers but rather to target large audiences that share common attributes at certain moments. It’s easier to advertise on owned channels – as first-party data delivers valuable signals about customer wants and needs. But paid channels often lack that same capability and transparency. This makes it difficult and expensive to connect your owned touchpoints – and it disrupts your customer’s journey.

Creating omnichannel customer experiences is an elusive but not impossible goal. Today’s consumers demand their telecommunications brand understand their needs, personalize their experiences, and do it without violating their privacy. Until now, brands only had full control over their owned channels like websites, email, blogs, and mobile apps.

Paid channels like search, social, and display are often siloed and operated externally. It’s an antiquated approach – not just because it enables outdated, segment-based campaigns, but also because it often relies on anonymous third-party data to scale, reach, and unify the customer journeys.

The cookie conundrum

In 2020, Google announced that it would be deprecating third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Cookies are a small piece of code that acts as a source of data for many third-party audiences. It powers so much of the digital advertising ecosystem that the news sent marketers scrambling to find a replacement. Without third-party cookies, legacy campaign approaches are rendered ineffective and unsustainable.

Say no to silos

Siloed paid channels aren’t just disruptive to the customer journey, they pose a set of additional challenges for the brand, including:?

1. Lack of transparency:

Most marketers agree: Mapping attribution?across disconnected channels is a waste of time and resources. If you can’t connect the dots, how can you prove return on ad spend? ?

2.??Reliance on segmentation and static campaign approaches:

Despite the prevalence of segment-based approaches, grouping people together rather than treating them as individuals is not customer-centric nor empathetic.

There’s very little room to factor in customer context – which changes rapidly on the web – into an engagement. Actions are instead predetermined by the marketer purely for the benefit of the brand, instead of putting the customer at the center of the journey.

The only sustainable future for advertisers in a post-cookie web is one that maximizes their first-party data and uses artificial intelligence. This means taking insights and signals about your customer and activating them across the entire customer journey, which includes both owned and paid channels.

Take control of your paid channels

?At Pega, we help brands do just that with Pega Paid Media Manager. It uses a central brain that takes first-party data from your owned channels and uses AI-driven, real-time decisioning to automatically engage each individual with relevant offers on paid channels like Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Instagram – just to name a few. Paid Media Manager enables the next level of personalized, relevant ad experiences by:

???Optimizing your targeting and bidding strategies with machine learning.

Automatically refactor your audiences across platforms every time you get new data about a customer – ultimately optimizing conversion.

???Eliminating wasted ad spend by suppressing low-value ads.

Automatically update each platform via API after a customer makes a purchase, when an offer is no longer relevantor when they’re no longer eligible.

???Jump-starting growth.

Use precision look-alike audiences instead of generic audience segments to help you acquire high-value prospects – unique individuals with the potential to become your best customers. And that's because they are modeled after your actual customers, not just from data inside an audience segment.

???Activating always-on marketing and reducing silos in your stack.

First-party data fuels content optimization across channels in a circular motion, driving always-on marketing and unifying the customer experience. ?

Digital advertising needs a first-party approach, unifying paid and owned channels, delivering compelling CX, building trust and loyalty.?

?"Thankfully, we made the right decision and we chose Pega for both brands…So a single, real-time decisioning brain powering the decisions across the two brands and multiple channels.” - Leana Kielkowicz - Head of Decisioning, BT

?Who’s leading the way in the Telecoms industry?

The globally recognized telecom company, BT, achieved world-class, personal lifecycle management after their acquisition with mobile phone company EE created a need to integrate processes and two from two organizations.

As a company, BT is on a quest to provide brilliant digital and in-person experiences everywhere, at any time. To deliver on this vision, BT has been investing in the digital space. After BT acquired EE, the communications service provider needed to connect the dots – not just between channels, but across two different organizations with disparate processes and technology tools.

BT wanted to provide both agents and users with a simple and streamlined process. With multiple CRM systems, this meant that BT would have to integrate all systems to simplify the underlying complexity of the decision-making process. By implementing a single, real-time decisioning brain to power decisions across BT, EE and multiple channels, the organization could feel more confident that customers were receiving the best experiences, no matter which channel they chose to interact through. Using Pega solutions, BT has also shifted responsibility into the hands of the business users to put customer needs at the center of decision-making.

Partnering with us here at Pega meant BT achieved a simplified and streamlined process of customer interactions, reducing the need to switch between 100+ applications. They replaced over 17 different versions of a decisioning tool across different channels with a single brain that powers decisions across all channels and empowered business users to engineer their own solutions without relying on the IT team.

Visit pega.com/paidmedia to learn more about how you can use Paid Media Manager to make your advertising more effective.