We’re entering an interesting year for brands, a time when ad spend is purportedly on the decline but the technology for reaching consumers is advancing by leaps and bounds. Media consumption continues to fragment and measurement becomes more essential, while at the same time consumer caution around the economy compels brands to focus on awareness, with an eye to loyalty. The linkage between these market conditions is data.
With the right data, advertisers can curate messaging and scale engagement with key audiences as quickly as they can shop. The challenge for marketers in 2023 will be to create purchase moments wherever their brand message appears. To do this, they’ll need to draw on rich customer profiles that incorporate quality first-party permissioned data.
Here are three data-based trends we think will guide the ad community through the year ahead.
1. Hyper-personalization rules (with the right data)
AI-powered tools are giving us deep, real-time insight into consumer behavior that is consented and compliant. It’s in marketers’ best interest to leverage this technology, since it enables relevant connections with customers at critical life-cycle junctures.
The ability to understand buyer motivations in real-time gives marketers the ability to adapt, simplify, or experiment with ad inventory more quickly — a welcome option when purse strings are tight. The result is hyper-personalized content and an improved customer experience that puts brands one step closer to “closing the loop” on activations.
2. Rise of the retail media network
Speaking of closing the loop, brands have an abundance of options in 2023 for creating the perfect first-party portrait of their target customer. Retailers are getting into the game with their own data platforms, dubbed retail media networks (RMNs), that promise shopper insights built on transaction receipts and customer loyalty information. The sector, now a $50 billion market led by the likes of mega-retailers like Amazon, Target and Walmart, is only set to grow in the new year — and grow more vital to brands that have relied historically on third-party data.
In some ways, Attain serves as a retailer-agnostic RMN that redefines what shopper data can be and how marketers use it — but it’s so much more than that.
Through its first-party, fully permissioned and cookieless commerce data, Attain offers a limitless view of millions of customers as they shop your brand across multiple merchants, verticals and retailers — not just one — so you have a more complete picture of their spending habits and how they’re responding to advertising in real-time.
3. Balancing fragmentation with brand-building
Beyond RMNs, we’ll see continued ad growth around media options like connected TV. In what proved to be another golden year for video, 2022 showed us that streaming and live viewing are where it’s at. (The latter is also a reminder of the multiple purchase moments that can be built around a single event: For this year’s World Cup, brands created resonant marketing experiences for visitors to Qatar as well as fans at home watching on an ever-expanding list of platforms.)
While the scope of consumer attention inevitably points toward making media more efficient and justifying ad dollars, it’s important not to lose sight of the bigger picture: brand-building. Never mind the mid-funnel response; if you don’t invest in connecting with people in a way that moves the business forward for the long term, you’ll end up losing customers anyway. As each generation settles into its preferred mode of media consumption, brands must continue investing in learning what makes their customers tick and use it to optimize market value.
About Attain
Attain is a comprehensive consumer data platform for marketers that provides them with access to first-party commerce data of millions of consumers who have opted-in and given their permission. Attain’s platform empowers its partners to leverage better data for insights, programmatic media and measurement — ultimately driving better business outcomes.
