Everything was supposed to change. There was supposed to be a revolution.
Back in the second half of the 1990s -- the heyday of the first dotcom era -- we all thought the power of the internet would transform marketing itself. We all thought the internet's unprecedented interactive capabilities and truly revolutionary speed and targeting would enable us to attain the Holy Grail of marketing -- true one-to-one relationships between advertisers and consumers.
And yet here we are, some 10 years later, and we're still partying like it's 1999 (or 1979 for that matter) -- running display ad campaigns as if they're television commercials, with one creative to reach and influence a mass run-of-network audience or, at best, slight variations to win over bulk segments.
Come on. No wonder so many marketers can't make online advertising pay out anymore.
So what happened to the revolution? Where did we go wrong? The answer is fairly simple. We failed to get personal. We took all of the amazing new capabilities of online media, and we plugged them into the same mass advertising format that has dominated our industry for more than a century.
It doesn't have to be that way. There is a growing movement in display advertising centered on a new approach that's been quietly making a significant impact for online marketers over the last few years.
The solution to mass marketing
In essence, the approach centers on personalizing media to the individual. As such, a key component of this methodology is using consumer data to make every marketing decision dynamically at the user and impression level. In other words, it's about literally personalizing the ad to the individual user, enabling everything from the banner creative to the media placement to the frequency of contact to be determined in real time based on known information about that specific consumer, including geo-demographics, site-based actions, and multi-channel transactional information.
By comparison, marketers used to have to make all of their decisions about creative, offer content, and media placement on a mass scale at the segment level. Think of a personalized campaign, rather, as marketing to a segment of one, making every online impression unique. The benefit of this model is that it drives more meaningful advertisements for consumers, as well as higher returns, far less waste, and improved user engagement for marketers.
Let's look at an example of how this plays out in practice.
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