Your products and marketing techniques are what differentiate your brand from the competition. Here's one technology company that can help you stand out from the crowd.
We've all heard the old adage "change comes from within," yet that philosophy is rarely applied to businesses. It's a marketer's job to help differentiate their brand from the competition, and this is achieved by intense planning, targeting, transparency, and customization. Often, real change means a complete overhaul of the marketing process.
"One of the biggest discussions we have with brands [centers on] competitive differentiation," said Edward Montes, CEO of Digilant, in his Spotlight presentation at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coronado, Calif.
In his presentation, Montes drew comparisons to advertising technologies and enterprise systems that work as cross functional integrated information systems (i.e., as a system used by organizations to support business processes and provide an underlying platform for data integration). According to Montes, a one-process-fits-all approach not only destroys competitive advantage, but weighs down processes with a lot of extra services. This means that brands have to either reconfigure the existing system -- which is very expensive -- or reengineer the process to fit the big enterprise system.
This isn't a new dilemma: During the advent of client server technology in the 1980s, businesses went from generalized to specialized processes at the group level. As a result, large businesses were challenged with finding a way to integrate all of their individual systems. So, while time has proven that a generic system can be valuable, it is generally much less effective than a vertical system -- especially when it comes to advertising.
So how does a brand go about implementing a vertical system? One solution is to partner with an independent marketing company that provides a customized support platform as well as an end-to-end solution that spans from planning, to targeting, to intelligence.
Advertising technology businesses are quickly catching on to meet the needs of their clients. "Everyone wants to be software as a service...everyone wants to be employed as an enterprise solution," said Montes.
Digilant (formerly known as Adnetik) specializes in just that. "Digilant's mission is to provide you with a platform where you can look at all the information, collect the information in the platform, and have the ability to action that information in that same platform," said Montes. "One of our goals -- and one of the things that we believe is happening in the advertising technology space -- is that the evolution of the technology is providing transparency like never before, both on the publisher side as well as the buyer side."
Montes believes the future of ad technology lies in the ability to create customization at scale. Customization is reliant on three major components: data, inventory, and algorithm.
"Understanding the most important predictors of price in conjunction with target creates efficiency," said Montes.
In short, the answer is better tailoring of products to practices and better practices derived from intensive research and analysis.
Jennifer Marlo is associate editor of iMedia Connection
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