3 things marketers get wrong about ad tech

Your customers are likely interacting with brands across 20 different channels every day. And yet, you still must build meaningful connections with them while reducing redundancies and inefficiencies.

These days, though, you have far less time—and often fewer resources—to do so.

The answer to getting ahead of this challenge can lie in ad tech, by leveraging solutions like programmatic advertising and clean room technology. But while ad tech has helped many brands tackle the challenges presented by the constantly changing advertising industry, there are still misconceptions about what it can (and can’t) make possible, even among industry veterans.

To help clear things up, we’ve laid out three common misconceptions about ad tech—and how it’s helping marketers tackle some of today’s biggest challenges, and how you can work with the right provider to achieve your goals.

A 360-degree customer view is a complete understanding of your consumers, gained by aggregating signals from the various ways they engage with a brand. Such an insight can help brands to provide better, more relevant consumer experiences—something we’re all striving for.

Unfortunately, it’s also extremely challenging to attain. In fact, according to technology research and consulting firm Gartner, only 14% of companies say they have a 360-degree view of their customers. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to achieve.

Today, brands need more than just media providers; they need trusted partners to help them create a positive value exchange with customers. Only then can they gain insights into a breadth and depth of signals that tell a meaningful story.

Tech providers can help create that stronger 360-degree view of existing and perspective customers. That is, as long as they offer diverse touchpoints, like Amazon where our hundreds of millions of active customer accounts worldwide are either shopping, streaming movies, or listening to their favorite music, audiobooks, and podcasts.

By now, it’s old news that certain advertising identifiers are on their way out. At the same time, it remains critical to continue to reach the right audiences while maintaining consumer trust, and understand how advertising efforts are performing.

The solution lies in embracing machine learning and privacy-centric clean room technology, like Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). This underscores the importance of working with providers that can offer more than just media. For example, AMC can help you surface key audiences, gain more consumer insights tied to ad exposure, and understand how different advertising types are performing. Analysis through AMC can empower you to better understand the attributes of engaged audience groups, as well as the effectiveness of different media combinations in achieving desired goals.

In addition, in line with our dedication to preserving consumer privacy, AMC only accepts pseudonymized inputs and generates aggregated, anonymous outputs, and all information in an advertiser’s AMC instance is handled in strict accordance with Amazon privacy policies.

These days, the consumer journey can look more like a revolving door than a straight line from point A to point B. But for marketers who are under increasing pressure to justify the value of their advertising efforts, that’s an obstacle.

It can be challenging to tie media exposure back to business outcomes, wherever they spend time. At the same time, marketers need to get the most out of every dollar by finding efficiencies and prioritizing solutions that drive the best performance.

At Amazon Ads, we’re dedicated to building solutions that help marketers optimize outcomes vs. impressions. One solution we’re particularly excited about is Omnichannel Metrics (OCM), an attribution solution that helps advertisers measure the impact of their ad tactics on customer shopping activities across retail outlets, wherever they spend time, online and in store. With durable solutions like OCM, Media Mix Modeling, and Modeled Conversions and the learnings made possible through AMC, you can understand the impact of your ads across channels.

While the advertising industry continues to experience rapid evolution, we continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and find new and improved ways to help you solve your marketing challenges.