Retargeter

ad tech 2012: Back to Basics

Ad tech, the premier digital marketing event, incorporates conferences in nine cities across the globe.   ReTargeter is particularly excited for this week’s San Francisco event, taking place right in our backyard.

Featuring an incredible speaker lineup, ad tech is more than a networking opportunity; it is a valuable learning environment.  Ad tech attendees can always expect to gather rich insights from some of the best minds in digital marketing.

This year, we’re seeing ad tech sessions and speakers go back to basics, with a focus on serving the right message to the right audiences in the right places, with an added emphasis on attribution and measuring ROI.

Today’s average media user is consuming content on their smartphones and tablets, and discovering much of that content via their friends and influencers on social networks.   For brands, communicating with consumers on these new channels requires finesse, but at the end of the day, it’’s still all about communicating with your customer—something brands have been doing for decades.  Now, content needs to be optimized for mobile, but the bottom line is that it still must be good content.

Brands have been designing unique messaging for specific audiences since time immemorial.  The difference is that now we know more about our audiences and can speak to different segments with a higher degree of precision.   Online targeting tools (like ReTargeter) are not new this year, but they are becoming more ubiquitous.  Some form or another of online targeted advertising has become de rigueur for forward-thinking companies.

Attribution is also an important theme this year.  Not only does digital marketing provide more sophisticated audience segmenting, it allows for more rigorous tracking.  Yet many digital marketers are struggling with how to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and how to track and improve their digital ROI.

These trends were evident in the ad tech events that have already taken place around the world.  At ad tech New Delhi, CEO of Communicate 2, Vivek Bhargava, spoke about audience targeting, specifically focusing on how brands can hone messaging to niche audiences to improve relevancy and ultimately improve ROI.  LinkedIn’s managing director and VP of Asia-Pacific and Japan, Arvind Rajan, discussed how brands can improve engagement using data-driven networks.  Gian M Fulgoni, comScore co-founder, provided an overview of India’s current digital landscape and offered insight on measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising efforts.

In Sydney, there was also a focus on the importance of attribution.  Marketers, it was said, must operate with revenue in mind, and must use performance data to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

What are you interested in learning more about and which speakers are you looking forward to hearing?