I had a random thought at the end of 2019 that we will enter a tag-less world. Enter 2020 the world goes flat. The whole industry is on a fight to prove its value, budgets are cut, the 3rd party cookies are on oxygen, there is a whole load of redundancies and in-housing capabilities have been accelerated.
The main reason thinking about a tag-less world, brands should be putting customers at the centre of there product and marketing. The best marketing strategies comes from using data smartly, understanding the customer, creating emotional creative, building memory structures and nailing the customer experience. This is what drives profitability. Brands need to focus on two simple areas being customer and data centric. Tags are irrelevant in a customer and data centric world.
I am a big fan of tag managers; they play a significant role in the ecosystem. With server side Tag Managers it helps solve issues around web performance, extend cookie lifetime, better security + privacy and better integration with ad-platforms. With client side TMS it became a bottle-neck and tagging became a means to an end, but with server-side TMS it can help improve performance with better data collection and in turn help prove ROI. Maybe the solution is use to server side tracking to collect the data and send to the data warehouse, it also provides a workaround solution to relying on 3rd party solutions.
With the changes in legislation and also business requirements, we are moving away from ‘tagging’ becoming a core part of the data conversation. With zettabytes of data available, for the brands the data collected from ad-platforms, customer research and transactional data + more, brands are in a strong position to use the richness of data available to harness to deliver against business goals.
Developing a marketing data and tech ecosystem that caters to being customer and data centric becomes a necessity for brands in todays world. Most data and tech ecosystem are not catered to deliver against business objectives. In most cases the ecosystem becomes a cost and a hindrance to the business.
For many business: Python, Customer Data Platforms, Data Warehouses and Data Clean Rooms will become core components helping optimise business and marketing performance.
When building out the ecosystem and trying to prove the value of each tech there are 4 steps to focus on:
- Identify as many use cases mapping it from efficiency to revenue and low to high
- The impact it will have on the business, not only on marketing.
- How does it integrate with other tech?
- Are there any overlaps with other tech in the stack?
With the core tech this is how I see them integrated part of a marketing data & tech ecosystem.
A plug and play ecosystem is the future building around the core tech provides agility and flexibility to work with data & tech partners at any point in the journey. The ecosystem becomes data centric and it should allow measurement to be at the forefront that is bespoke and unique to the business model. It should allow creativity to thrive and measure the impact that it has on the brand.
The plug and play ecosystem ensure first party data is at the heartbeat of the ecosystem.
- The customer data platform provides a single customer view with the ability to activate on the insights generated
- Data warehouse provides ownership and control over data with flexibility over analysis
- Data clean rooms in a privacy world of a decentralized clean room provides huge opportunities of being able to share data in a controlled manner. This will allow brands to start forging 2nd data partnerships which could open more doors
- Python the options are endless in what can be achieved, it can enhance or compliment the data strategy
- Before adding additional tech to the ecosystem, selecting a Single source of truth is fundamental to help prove the value of your marketing and how it integrates with the wider ecosystem is critical.
With the evolution of business models, growth of technology and data, brands will need to think about what their data strategy is. The best data strategy is when it is driving long-term business growth and it helps define what the business strategy should be.
I still believe that in the new world of marketing we can live without tags. The end-to-end customer experience becomes core to the whole strategy and having the right data & tech ecosystem to support to drive the business forward.
