Marketing in the Now Economy

Delineate is a Business Reporter client.

“Half of my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half,” department store pioneer John Wanamaker supposedly once said. Although the world looks very different today, that assessment has continued to hold true for modern marketers.

Great marketing challenges await in the future. Consumers are buying products with a thumb swipe, expecting them on their doorstep within days, hours or even minutes. This is blurring the lines across retail, advertising and brand positioning, making advertising harder to execute and even harder to measure. We are in the consumer era of “now.”

The problem of “now”

Marketing tools need to provide reach across multiple channels, often at a single point in time. This transmedia approach of interconnected campaigns has seen new marketing technology (martech) platforms move to the center of the marketer’s suite of tools, enabling campaign decisions to be made quickly to maximize audience attention and spend. Short-term sales targets drive the need for immediate decisions, which means a need for immediate data. This has led to an increasing reliance on social media and search data to provide answers—even if those answers aren’t accurate.

When good enough is not good enough

Data collected from search engines and social media have a part to play in measurement. Simple social metrics provide marketers with a surface level of brand engagement and audience response to social media posts and campaigns, while social listening technology allows marketers to better understand consumer sentiment around a brand. But these quick solutions come with large caveats.

With heavy reliance on search and social for a broader view of the world, marketers face two main problems: a lack of context, and little in the way of quality control. Many automated tools can find words and associated phrases that help determine sentiment, but this is often confined to a single post relating to a brand or product, and does not place posts in the wider context of an individual’s worldview, beliefs or habits.

With the rise of privacy laws, creating an accurate picture of a consumer has become even more challenging. Consumers who were once accessible via the digital trail they left for marketers to follow are now using private browsing and turning off tracking features on their mobile devices, and are protected by laws governing information-gathering tools such as cookies.

Revolutionizing market research surveys

Surveys bring expansion and context to the marketing measurement toolkit, showing marketers the iceberg beneath the waterline. They provide a wider understanding of why people do what they do, so they can be influenced. Unlike passive social media monitoring, survey research is active; it helps brands drive real change, which can only be done by understanding how decisions are made, and the causal pathways that drive behavior.

Market research surveys have historically had a reputation for being slow and disconnected, often used in isolation to answer a particular business question. That world still exists, but it’s steadily being replaced by daily, actionable survey data, which is made available with modern data structures and tools on our Delineate Proximity™ platform.

A solution to the measurement and attribution problem

Launched in 2021, the Delineate Proximity™ platform measures advertising campaigns as they happen across all media channels and touchpoints. It uses daily surveys for a representative view of the world, with data streamed directly into a client’s data lake so it can be connected to other real-time data for attribution modeling, in-flight adjustments and creative optimization.

For those worried about that wasted 50% of advertising spend, Delineate Proximity™ offers the solution. Brands using our platform are saving 25% of their overall advertising spend. Get in touch here to talk to us about our revolutionary approach.

Join the research revolution! Learn more at delineate.ai.