Igniting Customer Connections: Fire Up Your Company's Growth By Multiplying Customer Experience & Engagement

Chapter 18Online Marketing/Advertising TechnologyWhat Marketers Need to Know about This Key Area

Any of our technical topics covered here in Part Three could be the subject of a lengthy book. But it would need to be updated daily (or hourly) since technology is an ever-shifting story, driven by new needs and new technologies that meet those needs. Instead, here are five key points about advertising technology (ad tech) that marketers need to know—no matter what you're marketing, how large your organization is, or what your infrastructure looks like.

It's All about the Audience

Most marketers know this instinctively. Marketing is not about an ad or a technology platform. It's about communicating with a living, breathing consumer in a personal and relevant way. Historically, online marketing has not been consumer-focused. Early online advertisers purchased ads on websites using the average profile of visitors to that website as a proxy for targeting. At the time, this approach was better than nothing, but it was based on the flawed assumption that everyone who visited a given site looked the same. New advances in digital media technology now enable marketers to target specific consumers—regardless of which website they visit. This type of media buying, often referred to as programmatic or audience-targeted media, is growing dramatically.

Figure 18.1 The complexity, accuracy, ...