Slide Show: Seven Shifts In Marketing Measurement For 2016

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Shift #1: Brands will take back control of their data.

Brands will increasingly demand more transparency from their agencies. Owning all of their data–performance, targeting, audience, etc.–will take priority as they try to improve efficiency in today’s accelerated marketing environment. In addition, more control will make brands more effective. They will be able to measure performance on their own, leading to increased agility and better, faster decision making.

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Shift #2: Agencies will lose the battle to programmatic.

Brands will continue to shut agencies out of the media-buying equation as they increasingly rely on programmatic-buying techniques. As media buying becomes programmatic, it will also become a commodity. Bringing media buying in-house will also give brands more control over data and the ability to further define their own audiences on the fly. After decades of questioning the value of agency partners, brands will force them to reinvent by scaling content and creative, rather than relying on media buying.

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Shift #3: Marketers will embrace enterprise software solutions.

As brands bring more marketing capabilities back in-house, brands will also embrace the need for enterprise-ready software solutions that optimize the use of data in marketing organizations. Taking programmatic media buying as an example, brands will start implementing their own data-management and demand-side platforms solutions rather than relying on third-party services. This will give them more control over the management of their audiences.

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Shift #4: Mobile will reshape brand-to-consumer interactions.

As the time spent on mobile devices versus desktops continues to climb, brands will transition away from email as their primary communications mechanism. More marketers will rely on text messaging and mobile app notifications as the predominant means to interact with their consumers.

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Shift #5: Spending patterns will continue to change.

Today’s brands realize they need to interact with consumers in different ways. As a result, their online spend will continue to grow faster than their offline spend, while over-the-top media will quickly grow at the expense of traditional TV spend. In addition, spending on mobile-related mechanisms will increase as investments in browser-based mechanisms decrease.

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Shift #6: Big data hype will blow up.

Big data alone does not solve marketing or business problems–in fact, it can often create new concerns. Obsessively collecting marketing data into a centralized big data platform is not enough. To avoid a big data bust, marketers will need to shift their focus from hoarding data to generating real value from all available data (big and small). Marketers will push past the storage focus and realize the importance of turning data into business insights.

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Shift #7: Marketers will demand more tangible results from measurement methods.

Marketing organizations are determined to figure out which activities drive business results and have spent a tremendous amount of energy implementing different methods. However, they are starting to realize that the resulting benefits are not always worth the investments they are making. In the year ahead, marketers will place less importance on attribution and marketing-mix modeling as they discover methods to measure effectiveness that can quickly drive meaningful business results.