Seven thousand marketers, creatives and engineers showed up in Salt Lake City last week for the Adobe Summit, a four-day conference on digital marketing and the technology that supports it. Adobe showed off new additions to its widely-used Marketing Cloud platform, and attendees heard from thought leaders ranging from Gartner’s top marketing analyst to Razorfish’s @retailgeek Jason Goldberg to Michael Keaton (yes, Batman).
What can such an assorted group offer marketers and media professionals?
Analytics don’t always provide the details
The latest to wade into the art vs. science debate over whether data should rule marketing expertise was Steve Young, former NFL quarterback and ESPN commentator, who spoke as the day two keynote. His insight on analytics: “They always say they never lie, but numbers don’t tell the whole truth either.” His example: the final play from this year’s Patriots-Seahawks Superbowl match.
For anyone on another planet at the time, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson threw a pass from the 1-yard line that should have scored the game-winner. Instead, the Patriots intercepted, spoiling what had been a sure victory.
The next day, Nate Silver’s sports blog ran a story justifying the play, in part by citing NFL stats showing league quarterbacks had a 61% success rate throwing touchdown passes from the 1-yard line, compared to only 57% for running the ball in.
Young railed against this logic. “When he says that 60% of throws from the 1-yard line are successful, that’s because of where they throw it. They throw it to the far reaches of the endzone, in the corners where it’s safe — because it will go out of bounds or to my guy. Nobody throws from the inside,” he told the Summit audience. “What Nate didn’t tell you is there are 0% of throws from the one-yard line that have ever been thrown inside the box, in the history of the game. Zero.”
The moral for marketers: sure, analytics may justify a certain course of action, but analytics never understand the situation as well as a practiced expert does. Numbers are there for broad guidance, but since fine-grained tactical decisions depend even more on context, they’re much more vulnerable to the pitfalls of data-driven decision-making.
Smart companies use more external data
According to Gartner digital marketing analyst Marty Kihn (one of the guys responsible for this eye-bending graphic), U.S. companies that are more progressive in digital marketing are much more likely to be buying third-party data to supplement their own customer analytics.
“For all the surveys that we do, those companies that are more promiscuous in importing data, exporting data, opening up data, sharing with partners, encouraging app developers to sit on top of their system, those companies do better,” Kihn said.
“You might say well, ‘are they doing better because they’re so open to data, or are they open to data because they’re smarter?’ I think it doesn’t really matter – smart people do this.”
Ad tech and marketing tech still live in two different worlds
Not many people are familiar with the distinction between ad tech and martech, but there’s no shortage of CRM database marketers who can’t tell an ad buying DSP from an SSP, or programmatic jocks who wouldn’t know what buttons to push in Adobe Marketing Cloud.
Gartner’s Kihn said that the distinction between programmatic ad tech and enterprise marketing tech is about more than just training. It’s cultural.
“The difference between the marketing technology world and the advertising technology world is deep,” he said. “There are a lot of people in the tech world that have no respect at all for advertising. They don’t see that it has measurable value. They think it’s a waste. They think it’s all about celebrities and cocktail parties. This cultural rift has broken out at the tech level.”
Like many analysts, Kihn predicts that the two technology sectors will merge, and he sees the beginnings of those mergers in data management platforms and enterprise marketing hubs. One day all marketers and agencies will access everything from email marketing to user experience design and display advertising from the same platform (which he likely hopes is his product, Marketing Cloud), but not before ad tech and martech overcome their differences.
Social doesn’t have to be sexy to work
Not many in the audience were pumped to hear about social branding from TTI Floorcare, maker of Dirt Devil and Hoover vacuums. It’s not really a brand that inspires people.
And Andy Netzel, senior manager of social media for TTI, knows that. “No one wants to tweet about their vacuum,” he said.
But that doesn’t stop Netzel from finding ways to drive customer engagement with social. Instead of creating branded content that tries to make floor cleaning sexy, TTI focuses its efforts on responding to negative product reviews on Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.
Say someone who recently bought a vacuum couldn’t get it to work properly, so they returned it to the store and wrote a scathing review. Netzel and his team read reviews, figure out what the likely issue was, and create a personalized video response that walks the customer through the process for fixing it. The response then lives on the review site, so anyone reading about the product can see how to solve the issue, and they see that Hoover actually cares about good customer service.
“From a strategic standpoint, setting up marketing campaigns that drive people to create a community around your vacuum cleaner is just not realistic,” he said. “So many brands that are low-interest are trying to cling to these real-time marketing trends. Nobody wants to see that.”
Review responses may not be viral, but they are useful. And they’re not invasive or annoying. “If you own that product and you search for it and find the solution, you’re so thrilled that this exists,” Netzel said. “That’s the kind of stuff I want to do on social.”
