I sometimes think I’m writing too much about ad targeting, but then I ask myself: would Dear Reader rather learn that Sailthru has a new SMS? Probably not. So here’s news that audience creation company Dstillery can now target programmatic ads using real time signals like URL, location, and time of day. There’s no persistent ID or contextual targeting; there’s also no way to track results outside the ad impression itself.
I don’t know how many barroom brawls have started as debates over vertical vs horizontal integration, but BARC is pulling no punches in this attack on horizontal business intelligence. They blame it for over-centralization, loss of flexibility, and the growth of poorly-governed “shadow BI”. BARC favors vertical (that is, department-specific) BI and sees machine learning as the key to self-service “data democratization”. Interesting insights.
TV set maker Samsung is also helping to target ads. They’ve just launched Total Media Solution, a managed service that loads an advertiser’s media purchases into Samsung’s own Demand Side Platform, watches the ads received by each viewer, and makes incremental ad buys to reach to viewers who were not exposed. It’s a clever, if creepy, use of Samsung’s ability to monitor content consumption on its TVs.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.