During season 1 of The Undiscovered Metric in the summer of 2023, we asked our guest speakers what they saw as the biggest topics and trends we'll see in marketing and marketing analytics across the next 18 months.
Then we put it all together into a quick video so you can watch it! Here’s the video below or, if you’d prefer to read instead, just scroll down!
Sinem Soydar, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Vodafone
“Yes, I guess let's consider our times as the post-COVID times, right? We’re faced with turmoil in the economy, and in household budgets, and most industries aim to give the best value at the best price while doing responsible marketing. That means, as marketers, we have an important agenda of optimization. Growth needs to come from customer satisfaction.
“You can measure satisfaction with many metrics like conversion rates, and customer retention, these are the key metrics that you can convert to customer satisfaction. Growth metrics in revenue building should be addressed in different industries, and customer satisfaction in web and app journeys needs to be addressed clearly across the board. And of course, forecasting models, and forecasting marketing models to understand better the optimization opportunities could help many markets.”
Watch the full episode with Sinem here
Mitesh Lakhani, Director of Solutions Consulting, Adverity
“I think we’ll see more pointed approaches, brands who pick a platform because they know it works best for them. Brands that reinvest their money more carefully into the quality of the content they trust will thrive. Specializing in proven channels and platforms will be the way to thrive in this new market, rather than sticking to the status quo and spreading the budget too thinly across all channels so as not to miss anything.
“That sort of scattergun approach isn’t going to yield as many learnings because the sample sizes become really small. Doubling down on the platforms and on the tech that works best to pinpoint these will be much more beneficial than a one size fits all approach, I think we’ll see a real pattern of this across the next 12 to 18 months.”
Watch the full episode with Mitesh here
Johannes Höller, Head of Data Consulting and Solutions, diva-e
“The impact of artificial intelligence is already a big part of the current landscape and will continue to grow. It's not just ChatGPT, there are way more things you can do when it comes to AI. For example, AI can analyze huge amounts of data within seconds to identify patterns and insights, to improve targeting and personalization.
“Companies are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of providing a positive customer experience, and are investing in technologies that can help them do so. This may include chatbots, virtual assistants, data platforms, and other tools that can help customers find the information they need quickly and easily.”
Watch the full episode with Johannes here
Kim Whittaker, Director of Professional Services, Adverity
"Firstly I’m expecting to see even more short-form video trends. You only have to open Instagram to see how the platform is trying to push you to upload reels rather than pictures. Also, the increased revenue and usage on TikTok is a good indicator here.
"Secondly, there’s an increased focus on first-party data due to restrictions on third-party. Google is set to deprecate third-party cookies by 2024 which has had frequent delays and has been pushed out. I am sure there will be a lot, and there has already been a lot, of conversations and discussions on its replacement too."
Watch the full episode with Kim here
Arno Witte, Senior VP of Data Science, Objective Platform
“Meta and Google are already focused on MMM. I think we’ll see marketers take notice of this, and realize that making holistic channel decisions without MMM will be challenging. I think this shift towards MMM will go faster in the coming periods, and this will lead to more focus on upper-funnel behaviors. Automated MMM will become more important, which is why we have been focusing heavily on that part.”
Watch the full episode with Arno here
Sven Meijer, CEO, Objective Platform
“Rather than focusing only on low-funnel behaviors, companies will steer their mid-funnel to create more value from media.
“In some countries, the TV industry is saturated, so it’s necessary to find new ways to drive brands. Some clients are very successful on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and that’s their route for driving their brand — but are these going to be the future of building a brand? Are there any new platforms coming up in the future?
“I think still when you talk about MMM it gives people the feeling of looking at a PowerPoint with a lot of numbers showing exactly what has happened historically. But I think the Predictive path is more interesting for advertisers. Predictive analytics or AI is the future, and we use AI nowadays to calculate the best way to optimize media across channels for different KPIs.”
Watch the full episode with Sven here
Marco Senftleben, Senior Solutions Consultant, Adverity
“What comes to my mind is a Gartner study that says roughly 60% of all CMOs will cut their departments by half by this year because they failed in their promises to improve on data. And I think, besides cookie deprecation, besides the looming recession, and so on, to be against these headwinds we need to focus on our baseline. When it comes down to your data, analyzing and linking it together, and then visualizing it, is the fundamental part of working with data to improve your campaigns’ ROI. I think that's the main topic for this year, and maybe also next year.”
Watch the full episode with Marco here
Amy Woods, CEO, Content 10x
“I believe we will see more personalization and hyper-targeting in organic content marketing, as there is more data available for marketing teams to work with. This will give them more opportunities to personalize messaging and create targeted campaigns based on that personalized messaging. However, this will also bring an increased focus on privacy and data protection, particularly with GDPR in Europe, and potentially stricter regulations outside of Europe.
“In addition, artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a bigger role in analyzing data for marketing efforts. This technology will help to identify and analyze data, spot patterns, and make predictions about the future based on what we have seen in the data. ChatGPT is a popular topic in the content world at the moment, and it's just one example of how AI can assist with data analysis.
“Another area of interest is conversational marketing and voice search. With the rise of smart speakers and voice assistants, optimizing content for voice search and developing a conversational marketing strategy that takes this into account will be essential. It will also be important to measure the effectiveness of these strategies and optimize them accordingly. While I don't have expertise in optimizing voice search content, I am intrigued to see how it will play out, especially with the potential incorporation of AI.”
Watch the full episode with Amy here
Cam Benoit, US Solution Consulting Team Lead Adverity
“One trend that's really catching on right now is the use of auto-generated content, such as with ChatGPT. I think this trend is only going to grow in popularity, and agencies that aren’t using these types of tools will be missing out and will be less competitive.
“As we automate more and more of the content creation process, we also need to be automating the tracking of how these campaigns are doing. We need to be able to understand how ChatGPT-assisted campaigns are performing compared to those created by normal content writers. So while automated inputs are great, we need to ensure that we're tracking their effectiveness too.
“I think good old-fashioned organic marketing is something that a lot of brands haven't fully dove into yet. If you can be the encyclopedia of your industry, providing valuable content and educational resources on your website, you can really set yourself apart from the competition. This type of organic marketing is incredibly cost-effective, and it allows you to utilize all the talent within your organization to its fullest potential.”
Watch the full episode with Cam here
Amy Lawrence, Associate Director & Head of PR, Ginger May
“The word of the year last year was permacrisis. That’s how it feels. There's constantly something going on, we’re constantly switching. Given the dynamic nature of the industry with recovering from COVID and facing unforeseen economic situations, being nimble and agile is crucial.
“Another significant topic of conversation is AI, including ChatGPT, and how it will impact the PR industry. The balance between data and automation versus human input, particularly human curation of insights, is an important discussion. Additionally, there is a growing trend towards minimalism in metrics, focusing on what's most effective and resonates the most, while also being prepared to review and adapt as things change. It's important to constantly evaluate and align your metrics with your business objectives, which may evolve over time.”
Watch the full episode with Amy here
Dayo Fordah, Product Marketing Manager, Adverity
“Firstly, I think augmented analytics is going to be big. It's an approach to data analytics that is powered by AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modeling. It combines the client's historical data to automate processes that would be done by a specialist or a data scientist.
“Although this technology has existed for a long time, advertisers have been slow to see its value due to their data immaturity. However, with the recent rise of AI and machine learning like ChatGPT in creating content and making decisions I think the advertising world is finally ready to get on board with augmented analytics.
“Secondly, cookieless tracking is going to be important. We've been aware of the cookie-apocalypse for a considerable number of years now, but because Google's Chrome browser hasn't yet deprecated third-party cookies, many companies have been dragging their heels when it comes to understanding and utilizing all the different cookieless tracking technology available to them. Companies need to get a better understanding of how all the different walled gardens work and leverage first-party data, and zero-party data, through approaches like cohort analysis.
“Lastly, zero-party data is going to be big. Think of it as a subset of first-party data. This is the quantitative data that your users voluntarily give to you. And that data has a lot more detail into who they are as people — data about their sentiments, their behaviors, their attitudes towards your advertising. Marketers need to be collecting that data to build richer consumer profiles and get a more detailed understanding of the customer journey, the customer journey in the sense of all the different interactions that customer has with your business.”
Watch the full episode with Dayo here
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About The Undiscovered Metric:
The Undiscovered Metric is a weekly content series produced by Adverity as part of the Adverity Databuzz series. Identifying and looking at key data streams businesses use to evaluate their marketing performance. Each episode consists of a short video interview with guests, talking about the importance of data in their role focusing on a specific data source and the different metrics they gather, including what they consider to be the “undiscovered metric”.
