Digital Agency Manager: Ready to get ahead of the cross-device real-time data game?

   As a digital agency manager, be aware of the latest digital advertising trends: the cross-device integrated real-time data is changing the digital advertising game rule of how to market your brand to the most valuable customers through a most effective device/channel. As a Northwestern Medill Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) graduate student, I am not only interested but also doing some research of digital marketing. There are two articles that are related to the digital advertising that will change the way you see current multi-media advertising.

  The first article indicates the fast growing digital advertising market on mobile, video and real-time biding. Traditional online banner ads will gradually lose its market share in digital advertising and be replaced by these three areas. Companies that are aware of mobile, video and programmatic ads are getting ahead of the digital advertising game. Transactions made by mobile is steadily growing, video watched becomes more common among customers while real-time biding helps a company to target on its customers anytime, anywhere. See: “Mobile,Video, And Real-Time Bidding Are Driving A Boom In Digital Advertising”  written by Mark-Hoelzel 

   

(Cross media : yay or nay? )

  

  The second article is about the impact of the acquirement and the launch of Facebook’s Atlas. Solving the problems of “cookie” that have a tracking success rate less than 50% and cannot be applied on cross-device, Facebook’s Atlas is able to target customers with “people-based” technology and advertise to these customers on all mobile websites and apps by accurately predicting the customers’ preferences and monitoring their footprints outside Facebook including all websites and apps they are browsing and using.  See”What Facebook’s Atlas Means for Brands ad Agencies—Ad Serving and Tracing Technology Solves Two Big Problems forMarketers. written by Don Mathis 

    Based on these two articles and what I have learned from Northwestern Medill IMC, here are three action items I recommend you as a digital agency to do as soon as possible.  They are:

• Take it seriously -  While digital marketing has evolved rapidly, these developing advertising strategies have to be taken seriously or else you will be left behind in the marketing trend and lose the market share of digital advertising in a flash.
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• Get involved - Traditional way of buying ads by people will be outdated within just a few years. Programmatic ads buying leverage with real-time data from social media is going to replace the traditional mass media marketing. It’s time to contact expertise or companies that are making the future digital advertising game rule.
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• Be Aware - Other agencies will of course be noticing the ongoing changes. It would be about how well you can interpret the customers’ data as soon as you received a bunch of customers’ behavior and modify your targeting strategies.

  Be ahead of the game, it's time to better integrate cross-device real time data into your agency strategies.

Ivy Chen is a Graduate Student of Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), Medill, Northwestern University. She worked for Double A, an international paper company, in Taiwan from 2013-2014 as a Channel Development Coordinator. She is passionate about digital marketing and brand consulting and will be graduated from Northwestern in Dec, 2015. 

You can follow her on Twitter: @ivychen2015 or get connected to her on LinkedIn: tw.linkedin.com/in/ivychen2015