Next-generation campaign management: How campaign management will evolve to enable interactive marketing

— Mass media channels have lost their reach: Events such as the Olympics or the Super Bowl, which still reach enormous mass audiences, have become an ever-rarer exception. As the availability of content has grown, the mass audience has virtually disappeared. At the same time, as consumers flock to more personalised media, they are becoming increasingly resistant to conventional mass advertising — and they are tuning it out, often using Digital Video Recorders and other technologies to do so.

— Direct channels require more sophistication and integration: Buffeted by growing clutter and buyer fatigue, outbound direct channels such as direct mail, telemarketing and e-mail are suffering from declining response. Entirely new, but also highly personal, direct channels — such as marketing through mobile devices or targeted marketing communications in inbound customer channels including websites, customer service call centres and even ATMs or other points of sale — are also emerging. ¹ For both old and new direct channels, the solution is the same: traditional marketing tactics must give way to communication tactics that leverage customer information to support event-triggered, inbound, real-time, multistage and multichannel interactions.

— Online channels are growing up fast: The internet is no longer ‘new media’. Seventy to 80 per cent of consumers in North America and Western Europe are online, and 88 per cent of online users in North America have purchased online. ² Online channels are also continuing to evolve, widen and gain in richness and ‘sociality’, threatening the power and control that companies have traditionally maintained over their message and brand.

— Internet channels provide nearly universal addressability: Most sites can address consumers either personally by name, or individually by cookie. Behavioural and contextual targeting techniques are proven and widespread, and direct customer targeting through media sites will become increasingly commonplace as infrastructures improve. Search sites capture detailed personalised information for both contextual and individual ad targeting. In addition, subscription-based online channels such as podcasts are inherently addressable, wherever they happen to be.

— Conventional mass media is becoming increasingly addressable: A print copy of The Financial Times has limited addressability, but online the same content delivered to a customer logged in on ft.com is highly addressable. Even stubbornly ‘mass’ channels are becoming more addressable. The US cable industry's Project Canoe is developing advanced set-top boxes to enable individually targeted ads based on taste and lifestyle.^{3, 4} In a recent test, the Mini Cooper placed Radio Frequency Identification chips in selected key fobs, which were then read by digital billboards to display targeted messages as individuals drove by. ⁵ Advertisers are placing ‘Quick Response Codes’ on billboards that users can scan with their mobile devices, thereby delivering more detailed content to the mobile device. ⁶ Finally, supermarkets are trialing shopping carts linked to customer loyalty card databases, with LCDs that show customised advertising to individual shoppers based on their previous purchases. ⁷

— Customers have taken control over the relationship and flow of information: The internet has given customers unprecedented access to third-party information and opinions about your company, your offerings, your marketing claims, your service and often even your pricing. They can identify and leverage competitive alternatives that were once inaccessible. They are even gaining more control over how you contact them — and they can increasingly evade unwanted messages.

— Customers can now shape your brand: Whether you like it or not, customers now have a powerful ‘soapbox’ they can use to shape your brand. Universal McCann reports that 34 per cent of active internet users post opinions about products and brands on their blogs. ⁸ Some rave, but many more of them are raging at the customer service and marketing they encounter.

— Customers feel free to choose among — and move among — channels: Customers feel completely free to choose among channels — and to move among channels at will. ‘Multi-channel retail’ — purchases made after a shopping experience that encompasses online and offline channels — will be worth $1.2trillion by 2012. ⁹ In a recent survey, among consumers who made a considered purchase, 67 per cent engaged with the web at some point during their research process. ¹⁰ For commodity purchases, consumers may buy online one day and in your store the next, based on whatever is more convenient. In such an environment, it is not enough to simply deliver consistent messages across channels; you need strong cross-channel awareness of how each individual customer has responded (or failed to respond) in the past.

— react to customer inputs or changes in behaviour;

— identify the best treatment strategy in real-time, based on knowledge of the customer and the context of the inbound interaction;

— link discrete interactions into a dialogue that lasts over time;

— cross channels, and carry the dialogue forward by leveraging a memory of the conversation and the context of the current interaction.

— customer analytics that give marketers visual, graphical analysis of customer data, simplify the creation of customer groups and segments and enable marketers to quickly transform information into action, without programming or technical support;

— web analytics that draw on customer historical profile data and offline transactions, simplify the evaluation of web marketing effectiveness and help uncover customers’ unspoken intentions;

— predictive analytics that simplify market segmentation, response prediction, projections of cross-sell and lifetime value, and strategy planning;

— event detection to monitor each customer's transactional behaviour and set off triggers whenever meaningful changes occur.

— segmentation capabilities to group customers by like characteristics or behaviour, in order to treat them — and communicate with them — in the most appropriate way;

— offer management to define and manage cross-channel offers in a single repository and automatically identify the best marketing message to extend via any inbound or outbound channel;

— real-time targeting, combining dynamic segmentation logic with real-time learning algorithms and arbitration rules to optimise customer messages in real-time channels;

— interaction history that creates a two-way memory of every marketing message and the customer's reaction to that message;

— contact optimisation designed to help manage marketing communications over time against business objectives and resource constraints.

— outbound fulfilment tools that support list creation for delivering mail-ready files to letter shops and fulfilment houses, high-volume email execution, and smooth integration with third-party vendors for fulfiling to any outbound channel;

— inbound fulfilment tools that capture real-time contextual information from websites, call centre reps and kiosks, and forward offers to be presented immediately during a current interactive session;

— distributed marketing tools that provide campaign execution capabilities to store/branch managers and other field marketers, enabling them to take advantage of their closeness to the customer, within the framework and rules set by your central marketing organisation;

— lead and response management tools that can capture, score and rapidly route leads and responses to marketing contacts.

— centralised planning and budgeting that provides universal visibility, top-down budget allocations and full tracking of forecasts and expenses;

— comprehensive process management tools, including master marketing calendars to track programmes and maximise their visibility, as well as tools for assessing resource availability, assigning jobs and tasks, driving project schedules and managing reviews;

— asset and data management tools that capture reusable information and work, simplify management of project and campaign data and provide secure access to all creative assets;

— performance management tools such as dashboards that make it easy for management to track performance, troubleshoot problems and identify emerging trends in time to leverage them.