THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN MARKETER TO SMARTER, FASTER DECISIONS We live in a highly connected world where real‐time access to news, data, and information has transformed the way both people and businesses make decisions. More and more businesses are adopting technology to harness both the amazing amount of data available as well as to automate the execution of processes previously done manually. Marketing is no exception to this. With real-time bidding systems, ad exchanges, and “big data” projects, just to name a few, the focus of the marketer’s job is blurring with that of the CIO. With all this data, the risks remain high in what Eric Schmidt, then CEO at Google, termed the “last bastion of unaccountable spending.” And, the biggest risk is maintaining a focus on the consumer, while developing habits and adopting the appropriate technology to keep pace with a fast changing marketplace.

1. November 18, 2014 | By: Damon Ragusa
The Evolution of the Modern
Marketer to Smarter, Faster
Decisions
INSIGHTS
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2. THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN MARKETER
TO SMARTER, FASTER DECISIONS
We live in a highly connected world where real‐time access to news, data, and information has
transformed the way both people and businesses make decisions. More and more businesses
are adopting technology to harness both the amazing amount of data available as well as to
automate the execution of processes previously done manually. Marketing is no exception to
this. With real-time bidding systems, ad exchanges, and “big data” projects, just to name a
few, the focus of the marketer’s job is blurring with that of the CIO. With all this data, the risks
remain high in what Eric Schmidt, then CEO at Google, termed the “last bastion of
unaccountable spending.” And, the biggest risk is maintaining a focus on the consumer, while
developing habits and adopting the appropriate technology to keep pace with a fast changing
marketplace.
Reducing Risk is Key
Planning is all about reducing risks. Traditionally, marketers plan annually, aligned with the
cycle of TV and print media buying. The planning timeframe would typically address only the
following year. The key stakeholders form an executive committee where the marketer makes
recommendations based on insights and analytics of historical spend data and aggregations of
consumer data, which becomes foundational to the plan. In a stable marketplace, this
backward‐looking approach has been an acceptable method because of the assumption that
the future will be much the same as the past. In today’s rapidly changing marketplace, it is
becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to continue to eliminate risks through traditional
planning methods for four critical reasons:
• The proliferation of consumer devices
and emerging media channels has
dramatically increased the number of
options marketers have for
investments. With digital media now
embedded in every aspect of the
customer journey, marketers must
understand the impact of these emerging
trends on consumer purchase behavior,
alongside traditional marketing channels.
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INSIGHTS

3. • The barriers for people to switch from one media to another and adopt new
technologies are disappearing. People are no longer consuming information in a vacuum
but across channels and, often times, simultaneously; they have more CHOICE and VOICE
than ever. This increasing power of the consumer, coupled with the screaming pace of
technology, makes it more critical than ever for marketers to understand and align their
marketing spend with their consumer segments.
• The marketer has become inundated with the explosion of rich, but complex data
sources. From a world where only GRPs mattered, marketers are now overwhelmed with
impressions, mentions, likes, clicks, etc. As a result, much of the focus in planning has
turned to data collection, processing, and cleansing issues rather than focusing on the core
planning issue – how to target, reach, connect, and influence consumers to take action.
• Marketing planning committees are becoming overcrowded with stakeholders, each
working in their own silos, and each acting as an advocate for the tactic they
represent. Within a company, there is a growing number of functional team members
covering a variety of roles all connected to the overall marketing plan such as price,
promotion, digital, brand, distribution, etc.
Additionally, companies are working with more agencies than ever that play a key role during
the planning process. Because of this, much of the discussion around the future of planning
revolves around the relationship between the agency and the marketer, which, again, is losing
sight of the core questions marketers need to address.
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4.
Answer The Right Questions
The byproduct of these four intersecting
trends is that it is significantly more difficult
for marketers to process competing
pressures and answer the foundational
questions of a successful marketing plan.
The big questions marketers want answers
to is how to understand, target, reach, and
measure their relationship with customers in
such a volatile and data-driven marketplace.
More specifically, they want to know:
where to spend, how much to spend, and
when to spend in order to hit the right
people at the right times with the right
message to drive engagement and
purchase probability of a product or
service. And, they can no longer operate on
an annual planning cycle; marketers need
the flexibility to plan often and the speed to
gain valuable insights faster to adapt to
market changes.
To navigate this ever-increasing complexity,
marketers must shift the focus from data -
intensive tactical planning to a smart data
approach for strategic planning that is
centered around real people they are
targeting. And, to keep with the rate of
change, they must rely more on technology
that breaks down the barriers to a more
efficient, agile, and objective planning
process. As a result, planning will be more
focused on linking the brand directly with
consumers to positively impact sales,
market share, and financial performance
in a transparent and measurable way.
Many of the insights, analytics, and
processes used to inform marketers today
are based on aggregations of consumer
data, boiling all the diverse demographics,
media consumption, and behaviors into one
average consumer. This makes it impossible
to connect the very people they target to
specific marketing activities and messages.
For example, marketers have relied on
classical marketing mix models for decades
to provide insights on marketing
effectiveness. These models have never
provided insight as to how different
marketing plans can activate different
people, especially new media with no
historical data. This is because the basis of
the plan is to analyze the marketing
effectiveness in the past marketplace rather
than what the marketplace moving forward
will look like.
What makes marketing work is that
different people use media to varying
degrees and to carry out very different
day-to-day activities. The planning process
must be able to synthesize the audience
estimates commonly used to make media
buying decisions (GRPs, AQHs, circulation)
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5. with emerging digital measurements (CTR,
Impressions, mentions, likes, conversions,
etc.), and reconcile all these against
measures of how people behave.
A consumer-centric approach to marketing is
a more data-agnostic way to measuring and
forecasting the ROI across channels, tactics,
and consumers to make more informed
marketing decisions. It ensures that when
making key marketing decisions on how and
when to spend marketing dollars, it will have
the greatest possibility of positively
impacting performance.
Rather than aggregating all of the data
together for analysis, a consumer-centric
approach to planning starts from the bottom-
up. To be effective in an evolving
marketplace, marketers must take an
objective and detailed view of the
demographic make-up of their consumer
targets, the behavioral traits related to media
consumption, and the way in which
demographics are correlated to media
consumption. For example, older people are
more likely to watch more TV and read more
magazines, and younger people are more
likely to use mobile phones and social
media. Once this foundation is laid, standard
marketing science rules around purchase
probabilities become more practical because
it’s not just about how people consume
media but how they respond to marketing
and purchase products or services.
Take a Consumer Driven Approach
With increased C-suite pressure for accountability, marketers
across industries are already adopting a consumer-driven
approach to planning as a more sustainable and effective
method. A market leading pharmaceutical company was
looking to optimize its direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing
plan for the launch of its new product, while maintaining
constant flexibility to implement post‐launch adjustments in
real-time. Because of strict FDA regulations around approved
consumer targets and no historical data existed, the company
turned to a consumercentric approach to plan and optimize its
go-to market plan. Leading up to the launch, the company
was able to simulate patient responses in varying targets and
geographical markets to measure how each tactic influences patient adoption and purchase
behavior in order to accurately reflect and improve the ROI of its plan. The product leadership
team leveraged the results to better forecast ROI by marketing tactic and consumer group. It
also was able to incorporate external influences such as healthcare professionals and doctors
and how these would influence short and long-term product sales volume.
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6. A large provider of automotive products wanted to forecast and measure all its marketing
activities against its consumer segments for the greatest return on investment. Additionally, the
company was focused on growing sales within the Hispanic population and wanted to
understand how to allocate spend to optimize results within this segment. But, not all of its
marketing activities could be tracked back to specific consumer demographics. By adopting a
consumer-centric planning model that focused less on collecting massive amounts of data and
more on identifying the most relevant data for individual channels, the company was able to
measure and compare more than 200 marketing activities across four of its product lines to
forecast consumer purchase behavior within its demographic‐specific segments.
The company not only achieved ROI clarity by media channel, but also was able to forecast the
cost benefit of Hispanic mass media and determine that another media channel allocation
would be more profitable. Additionally, the company identified a link between Hispanic and
Youth segments for more integrated and profitable campaigns.
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7. Focus on Smart Data, Not Just Big Data
Completely shifting the foundation from where
marketers have traditionally built their plans
can be a huge undertaking. They are still left
with piles of data from traditional as well as
emerging media and digital channels that they
must sort through to extract value through a
“smart‐data” approach. Today, marketers are
inundated with technologies that purport to help
manage cross‐channel marketing.
Many of these technologies speak of handling “big data” with powerful algorithms, but we’ve
been down this road before. The advent of customer relationship management to support
one-to‐one marketing initiatives during the 90s started with a lot of promises of sorting
through huge amounts of data about consumers that would revolutionize the planning
and execution of marketing.
In time, the practical solutions emerged and were adopted after years of marketers
complaining about being “data rich but information poor.” Digital marketing channels offer
access to even larger amounts of data, but “big data” is a means to an end. At the end, we are
still left with the fundamental questions that the marketer is asking. The solution to today’s
twist on being “data rich and information poor” is figuring out how to extract “smart data” from
the myriad of new data silos being created, and the “smart data” needs to be managed in a
technology system that seamlessly integrates with the planning process.
Don’t Just React — Forecast
Marketers, especially marketers who are doing more and more digital marketing, no longer plan
just once or twice a year the way marketers did when the majority of their budget was invested
in TV and print – two media outlets that historically worked primarily on an annual basis. Now,
especially in the digital world, marketers are continually trying new things, seeing what works,
and making changes. The archaic processes of calling each agency and getting
recommendations from each functional head through excel or PowerPoint in a binder that
collects dust on a shelf is no longer a sustainable model to stay ahead of the competition.
Innovative technology that incorporates market and consumer research into a multi-year
planning process for more accurate forecasts as well as advanced collaborative capabilities
will emerge as market leaders.
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8. A large financial services firm was looking to optimize its marketing spend to acquire new
households at a cost effective price. Having recently increased its digital marketing efforts, the
company also wanted to measure the impact on short- and long-term financial performance.
And, all of this needed to be done considering the overall lifetime value of the households they
were targeting. By using consumer-centric planning software, the company was able to
quantify and provide in-depth analysis on how it’s measured and unmeasured marketing
activities, including digital, directly affected the addition of new accounts of varying value.
Additionally, it had actionable guidance on how much and where to invest its marketing budget
in the future to influence behavior within its target audience. The software also provided a more
agile and collaborative tool during the planning process to include the committee of principals
and managing directors as well as agency stakeholders in one central system for a more
streamlined planning and approval process.
As the marketplace continues to fragment, the risk is the consumer is slipping through the
cracks. Marketers spend too much time and resources investing in solutions to react to the
change, rather than embracing the fundamental shift that is occurring in the way they think
about and approach marketing planning. It’s becoming a world where the marketer needs to
think more like a CIO. They need to understand the information in front of them and put what’s
most important at the forefront – the consumer – to drive technological advancement that
integrates, automates, and streamlines the marketing process from research and planning to
collaboration and execution. From Schmidt’s warning, an age of marketing empowerment has
risen that will drive the evolution of the modern marketing world where every decision is
accountable and starts and ends with the consumer.
To speak to someone at ThinkVine to learn new ways to put the consumer at the center of your
marketing planning process, visit www.thinkvine.com or call + 1.513.842.5900
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