Navigating the ad tech minefield
There are over 300 Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers (PMDs), 12 Twitter Ad API partners, about seven or eight key Data Management Platforms (DMPs) and dozens of social data and sentiment providers. With so many options, it’s difficult to know which products are best for your business.
There are three choices: rely on their marketing material, invest the time and effort to decide for yourself or get advice from a specialist agency. Option one is a gamble, so let’s work out if two or three is the best route for your business.
Knowledge and impartiality
Many of these providers also sell services, but smart clients know that this doesn’t make sense. Obviously, any vendor is going to say they can meet all of your needs, even if they are really only strong in one area. And asking different providers to work together in a “stack” can be difficult if you are buying services from one of the vendors in question. It’s a complex problem to tackle; it requires a level of knowledge and impartiality that the vendors cannot supply. This has created an opportunity for a new breed of agency.
These agencies have a deep understanding of the available platforms, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how to drive business value for clients by combining them. Their in-depth knowledge of the technology means that they can see past the marketing fluff. Through their daily experience of working with the platforms, they can identify the tools that add real value and those that are just fancy dashboards sitting on top of other technology. Agencies license a variety of tools and can allow clients to access and compare the data. They can also help with analysis of the data and provide actionable insights, which, in this age of information overload, can be invaluable.
Testing tools
Let’s take sentiment tools as a case in point. Brand sentiment is obviously an important KPI for many campaigns: if people are saying good things about your products, their friends are more likely to consider your offering the next time they are in the market. This makes sense, but the problems start when we try to choose from the confusing array of listening or sentiment tools in the market.
You can rely on Forrester Wave or similar reports to help work out which tool to use, but some of their measurement techniques are less empirical than many advanced clients demand.
A simple method to verify a sentiment tool is to score a sample of posts manually, then compare the results to the tools that you are considering. You’ll have to get your hands dirty and read through a sample of posts for a particular brand for a set period, scoring each post as positive or negative. By performing this test, we have found that the accuracy of the available products varies from 60 per cent and up. This sounds acceptable until you consider that, assuming we were only testing for positive or negative sentiment, guessing would score 50 per cent!
Comparing the output of sentiment tools in this way is the only reliable way to test and select the right product for your brand.
Do you need agency help?
Not all clients need professional services to navigate this maze. As with anything that isn’t a necessity, agencies can seem expensive. Here are two questions to ask to determine if you really need agency support:
Do we have time as a team to keep up with the speed of technological innovation happening in the advertising technology market?
When selecting and integrating technology partners, do we have the scale as a business to thoroughly test enough products and services to make a reliable decision?
If you can answer yes to both questions then specialist agency services aren’t required. If not, you need to ensure that your agency partners have the knowledge and experience to help you maximise the combined potential of the available technology.