Unlocking Organizational Value in a Rapidly Changing Marketing Ecosystem

Despite continuous evolutions in the marketing ecosystem, advertisers and agencies continue to raise concerns about unlocking organizational value in rapid change. Coupled with this is the uncertainty around properly measuring marketing success, performance and managing customer data. Implementing data standards practices and strategies is key to navigating the growing number of touch points and inputs that companies rely on for marketing and advertising efforts. The bottom line is that data standardization strategies must be managed to achieve true organizational value.

Advertiser Perceptions recently reported that data standards have emerged as a necessity, with 95% of survey respondents agreeing that data standards are essential for ROI and measurement. This is crucial to progress focused on privacy and suggests that brands and agencies must collaborate to measure marketing success and manage customer data effectively. As a first step, all stakeholders must assess current trends in several key areas: the content supply chain, data standards, organizational roles and responsibilities, and the impact that reporting has on measurement.

GenAI and Content Supply Chain Visibility

Advertiser Perceptions found that two in five US advertisers are already using generative AI for ad creation, with another two considering it. As reliance on GenAI increases, advertisers must prioritize content optimization – through proper tagging and asset tracking – production processes and brand safety. Otherwise, you risk data inefficiencies, impacting advertising execution and competitiveness.

While the use of AI is growing, only 26% of advertisers feel confident in their ability to track AI-generated assets. However, tracking is crucial for measuring ROI, avoiding brand safety issues, ensuring effective ad targeting, providing transparency, and complying with regulations. Lack of proper metadata tagging and content identification prevents campaign optimization, leading to ad spend and missed opportunities. Seven in 10 respondents identified correctly tagging creative assets for tracking and optimization as their main challenge – unsurprisingly as manual tagging attempts to keep up with GenAI. This difficulty in tracking creative across channels complicates accurate ROI measurement, preventing data-driven decision making and effective budget allocation. Ultimately, advertisers estimate that one in four ads result in the wrong ad creative being served to the wrong consumer, leading to negative user experiences.

To overcome these obstacles, the industry must invest in advanced tools and technologies for content and creative tagging, tracking, optimization and attribution, while prioritizing data management and transparency to gain understanding completeness of the performance of the campaign in the channels.

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ROI Questions and Advertising Agency Involvement

American advertisers reported an average increase in ROI of 33% thanks to the introduction of standard data strategies. However, gaps in agency involvement in data standards practices significantly limit advertisers’ ability to achieve greater ROI, ensure privacy compliance and maintain brand safety.

The increasing number of platforms and decreasing signals have made demonstrating ROI and ROAS an increasing challenge for 79% of US advertisers. This difficulty has increased job insecurity, with 84% of agencies and 71% of marketers expressing fear of job loss due to the inability to demonstrate impactful results.

Implementing a common taxonomy and providing agencies with appropriate data access can significantly improve data transfer accuracy and directly link performance to campaigns and their creative assets. This visibility and enhanced control are necessary, considering that advertisers estimate that almost a quarter of ads are served incorrectly.

By establishing a unified data standards framework, advertisers and agencies can foster a collaborative environment, ensuring alignment and transparency. This not only simplifies campaign optimization, but also minimizes the risk of brand safety issues by proactively identifying and fixing potential issues. Ultimately, data standards allow agencies to make data-driven decisions, increasing campaign effectiveness while safeguarding brand integrity. Agencies can ensure accurate data transfer and use by following standards, reducing compliance and brand safety risks.

Reporting time and using Excel

Data management challenges persist, as evidenced by the average time of 2-3 days to resolve reporting errors and the increasing number of individuals (now up to 11) needed to address manual data entry errors . This highlights the increasing complexity and resource demands associated with these tasks.

Currently, agencies are more likely than marketers to combine data in Excel sheets and receive creative asset information via Excel spreadsheets. Relying solely on Excel is not a marketing metadata practice and presents several challenges. Manual data entry increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies, while collaboration becomes difficult due to version control issues. Integrating data from multiple sources is often time-consuming and error-prone. Ultimately, using Excel as the primary method for creating and managing metadata can negatively impact data accuracy, collaboration, scalability, and overall marketing effectiveness.

Everyone has a role

Standard data functions vary between roles due to employee responsibilities and goals, and access to data. Key roles in advertising shape the life cycle – strategic roles are optimistic but distant from processes, while operations and analytics face data integration challenges. Distance from specific functions limits access to data, while teams closer to the task better understand data strategies. More specifically:

• Analytics teams they are more likely to firmly understand how audiences are targeted in all digital formats, but struggle with the aggregation and transfer of data.
• Strategic teams are more likely to assume that workflows and technologies are incorporated into their practices of data standards, but must check the assumptions with the teams closest to the practices to ensure full awareness of what is still needed d attention and care.
• Ops Teams benefit from improved data accessibility and clearer guidance to strengthen their data standards strategy implementation. This group struggles with data silos and quickly identifies data that needs attention.

There must be synergy between these groups to understand broader advertising roadmaps, execution of plans with customer data insights, and reporting.

Data standardization is a critical part of modern marketing. Increase ROI, efficiency, marketing performance, privacy compliance, and data-driven decision making. Using data standardization allows organizations to navigate the complexities of modern marketing and unlock its full potential.

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