How brands can enhance the user experience through personalisation | M&M Global

How brands can enhance the user experience through personalisation

The ultimate user experience is right around the corner for many brands, claims Katie Field, UK managing director at Viant.

Katie Field

Personalisation within advertising is something that our industry has and continues to struggle with.

Even with the advent of behavioural targeting, consumers still find themselves on the receiving end of some pretty irritating ads that don’t take into account that they’ve seen them 20 times previously. According to research by Ovum, 52% of consumers polled like it when services are personalised to them and their interests, so we should be working towards making all interactions as personal and applicable to that user as possible.

The rise of ad blocking software globally has certainly made the industry sit up and listen when it comes to making sure that ads are relevant and non-intrusive, especially on mobile devices. Today, 15% of British adults use ad blocking software, according to the IAB UK and YouGov.

This kind of allergic reaction to consistently seeing ads that are irrelevant, popping up repetitively at inopportune moments across devices is something that we as a digital industry need to fix – and fast.

Cookies = people? No

The repetitive nature of advertising across devices is largely due to the idea that cookies equal people. As cookies don’t work on mobile and tablet devices, brands are currently guessing if they are advertising to the same user who was already exposed to their desktop ad.

However, with the emergence of people-based marketing brands are now able to advertise to identifiable people, rather than cookies, across devices by using registered user databases. Brands such as Viant, Facebook and Google with first party databases of over one billion people are all active in the space. Other big players such as Yahoo, Amazon and AOL are expected to enter this arena as well.

Trying to match up users across devices, without sufficient log-in data to prove that they are one person, means that advertisers will more than likely be spamming their potential customers – rather than cultivating them with interesting and sequenced messages, timed to reach them at a particular moment in their day.

“By using registered user data, people-based marketing gets advertisers closer to their dream of delivering personalised messages”

Despite the fact that mobile now represents 65% of all time spent on digital media, according to comScore, many companies still do not have a cross-channel strategy that enables them to personalise their messaging across devices. The CMO Club reported that 55% of companies have no cross-channel strategy in place. But we’re optimistic that this should change now marketers are being given the right tools to successfully plan and track what they’re delivering to their audiences across devices.

Dependent on whether the advertiser’s goal is to prospect for new business, or to communicate with its existing clients, personalisation of messages will always be key. Engaging in a people-based marketing approach gives advertisers the option to leverage rich consumer insights without having to have a large stash of first-party data themselves.

By using registered user data, people-based marketing gets advertisers closer to their dream of delivering personalised messages, on an individual basis, across different channels and devices. The ultimate user experience is right around the corner for many brands and the early adapters of these emerging one-to-one personalisation technologies will be the biggest winners.

No Comments Yet

Leave a Reply