In the latest episode in a series of video interviews entitled Quantcast Sessions, launched in association with Quantcast, Wharton discusses the importance data in creating more connected confident digital campaigns.
 

Wharton believes that the new big challenge for the business is dealing with the feedback coming from consumers and understanding how to interpret it and enter into a meaningful dialogue in the digital world. The opportunity to learn about your customers has never been greater and yet many businesses are failing to capitalise on that potential, argues Wharton – even his own.

“As a digital business, we’re still not making the most of digital,” he says. “Our media strategy, for example, is still pretty conventional.”

While keeping up with continuous technological innovation in the marketplace can sometimes be a red herring, says Wharton, but he points to “pockets of innovation” that have been successfully plugged-in to his own strategy with great results.

Wharton believes that today’s campaigns need to be much more connected and confident. A TV ad pointing to a website is no long enough. Instead, there is greater value in communicating with customers across a far richer decision journey – getting the right messages in front of them at the right time, flagging up a role for marketing automation, programmatic display, paid and organic search and increasing use of video communications by organisations of all sizes.

Sometimes, argues Wharton, it’s difficult to determine where an organisation isn’t ready for a new piece of tech or whether that same piece of tech isn’t ready for the market.

Take the debate and myriad solutions targeting attribution at the moment. Fragmentation and competition in the marketplace are sometimes blurring things than don’t need to be blurred, says Wharton. With so many vendors, offering so many different solutions, using different data sets, it can be exhausting to even assess your options. Time would perhaps be better spent actually trialling a range of technology and preparing a whitepaper on the results.

Wharton also argues that the tight focus of attribution on feeding the sales funnel and boosting sales in the short term makes it a fairly limited tool: “Our marketing strategy is actually a lot broader than that – building the brand and our position in the minds of UK customers.”

Wharton credits many of the affiliates he currently works with as genuinely innovative, continuously working hard to improve their service delivery. He also points to the digital outdoor display as an area where new ideas are constantly being introduced and tested and calls for similar levels of service innovation throughout the marketing industry.

Wharton was a speaker at Quantcast’s London Supernova event in 2014. The second London Supernova event, featuring a keynote by Sir Clive Woodward, takes place on 21st October. w

Other speakers include Matthew Luhn from the PIXAR Animations Studio, and Jeff Jarvis, author of ‘What Would Google Do?’.