Should we now abandon omnichannel marketing Gartner?

A recent video for CMO's and Marketers by Gartner Managing Vice President Christi Eubanks called "Exposing customer exposure" calls the 360 view of customers "unrealistic" and "violating". She goes on to map out a number of ways marketers use data to reach consumers and how those uses play out within a quadrant she has created using 1st and 3rd party data along with behavioral and Personal data, saying that while marketers think they might need all of that insight.....it is over kill.

But if you look at the model Christi maps out she fails to mention some pretty key components to a true omni channel campaign. If what you are going for as a marketer is personalization along with repetition of exposure to stay top of mind and get the most out of views / impressions then the model begins to break apart. Yes you will need PII for direct mail, email for email, online behavioral and cookie data for display and mobile ADID for mobile display in an omni channel campaign. You may also want purchase data or other more deterministic data to confirm you are customizing a campaign to the right person. A person who just bought a Bullet blender at Bed Bath and Beyond would be a great customer for Target, Publix, Meijer, WalMart, Wholefoods campaigns for fresh fruit specials. And the best way to reach them is on all of their screens and their mailbox with offers or coupons to gain their foot traffic. It is a simplistic view, but in todays always on connected world, marketers might even consider using GM's marketplace one day to send a radio ad to a consumer near one of those retailers. The Gartner quadrant seems to go back to trying to now silo how delivery is done by marketers saying only a few things are effective and for those you don't really need that much data.

What you need to know about data - while there are several factors that will determine whether or not your campaign will be effective, when it comes to delivery (execution, activation.....et al), how well the campaign reaches the right consumer and is personalized to then in a thoughtful way (it adds value) is only as good as the data used. If you have the bandwidth, quantity and diversity of sources should help you better determine the quality of the data you have. Using A.I. or other analytic platforms will also help you to find and remove outliers or data that may appear spoofed. The methods mentioned by Gartner make a lot of assumptions, and typically follow the view that only the sources and technologies they name are worth using to the field of acceptable alternatives are small works well with this model. But for marketers that work with data, they know even some of the best sources have some varying results and ROI once the data is anonymized and put to use. This will often bring them back to the quest for more data to validate what should and won't work and get better more granular personalization.

The bottom line - These days everyone in the data business seems to have some sort of identity graph. The usual questions like scale, accuracy, and hygiene are still important. But other questions like how the data is gathered, data points used to match the data and if it is online to offline or the opposite is important to as to determine a confidence score on how accurate the match often is. All of this means having a lot of data from different views of offline, online, and mobile data to be able to "know your customer" better.

Datastreams' Touch Platform Allows you to deliver your campaign to the audience you want through thier mobile devices at specific locations, within a radius of a Point of Interest or through a custom polygon of areas you wish to market to them at.You can use your first party data or we can help you augment your data and build audienes to add scale based on our own in-market data and identity graphing. Datastream offers a complete view of the consumer for Offline, online, mobile and video to allow you to deliver your campaign and value to the consumer in an omni-channel way.

Datastream has a competitive edge licensing their data because there is a large appetite in the current market for a marriage of digital identities to households. The Consumer Master File is built from active online consumer and business audiences and can be traced back to a postal address. You can also find our data on platforms like LiveRamp data store, Lotame, and others. For custom requests, or to find out more contact us. We specialize in helping you make sense of your data, engage and convert the right audience.. ([email protected])