Architecting Experience

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• About the Author
• Introduction

As the digitization of life proceeds with seemingly exponential progress, we continually find ourselves in an ever changing cultural landscape, where each day the amount of new information recorded is greater than all of the world's recorded information prior to the digital age, where the average citizen of nearly all nations has unprecedented access to knowledge, entertainment and opinion, and of course where those same citizens are exposed to hundreds of advertisements a day on screens both stationary and mobile…

The organizational discipline that defines the collection and integration of data, effectively translates that data into useful information, and applies that information to optimizing marketing delivery in a variety of forms is most clearly thought of as “Marketing Science”. As is apparent from this prior definition, data and technology reside at the core of marketing science. While this data can be derived from measurement in digital channels, it can also be accumulated through more traditional market research methods. In fact, to remain relevant in the 21st century, corporate market research functions are finding it necessary to build on their traditional market research data sources and capabilities to better understand digital consumers using digitally collected data. On the continuum of this evolution, what distinguishes marketing science for digital marketing from traditional research functions is that marketing science not only understands digital data and technology, but is able to strategically and tactically guide the organization in the application of insights from this data through both content and media technologies as the core driver in delivering relevance in the digital user experience…

The Applied Digital Analytics Playbook (ADAP) is a template that guides a deliberate and systematic journey up the analytics pyramid, and can serve as the core piece of documentation at the heart of every marketing science initiative. The ADAP allows the marketing science analyst to clearly identify the problems that data can solve, to identify the existing and needed sources of data to solve those problems, and to deliberately design the collection, organization and application of the required data to experience delivery and to the evaluation of the results of that delivery…

As discussed in Chapter 2, owned media are those channels in which a brand has complete control over access and content. Email was the first digital owned media channel to gain interest for marketing uses, and the corporate website — which quickly followed email in adoption — is still typically the most prominent owned media channel for brands. Web-based landing pages, online tools, mobile-optimized web sites and mobile apps are all owned media channels that can play an important role in a brand's digital marketing strategy…

We turn now to the ‘earned’ media channels in digital: organic social media and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Earned media is exactly what it sounds like: the presentation of our brand in media through channels not owned by us, and without buying those exposures. Both social media and search engine exposures also have paid options in paid social media channel advertising and paid search engine marketing, so it is not correct to generally view the social media or search channels as specifically either organic or paid. This chapter looks at the organic, earned manifestations of marketing through social media and search engines, and the next chapter turns to the paid approach to both channels.

Having toured the owned and earned channels for marketing communications, we finally arrive at the paid media channels. At its most basic, Digital Paid Media is an extension of traditional advertising, and as the channel name implies, paid media is where advertisers have traditionally paid out large portions of their budgets to have their message placed in front of consumers. In traditional advertising, these ‘impressions’ through paid media may be achieved through television, print, radio and out of home (OOH) placements such as billboards and bus-stop sidings. In digital advertising, impressions are still a currency of measurement for many formats — especially in digital display advertising — but as is to be expected with the digital format, engagement (e.g. click-through, field input, video play) has become an increasingly prominent measure of value and success, and in many cases, conversion against an outcome from that engagement is evaluated as the ultimate performance measure for paid advertising. Because so much money is spent on paid advertising, measurement of efficiency and effectiveness in paid media advertising has become a pressing concern for digital marketing managers, who need to understand and try to optimize the returns they are receiving from their expenditures across an ever expanding array of digital advertising channels. This interest in measurement has prompted the emergence of hundreds of technology solutions for managing and measuring paid digital marketing. This chapter will begin with a summarization of the paid media touch-points, the ecosystem in which these are activated, the fundamental measures of performance for paid media, and the ways in which analytics are being applied to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of paid media marketing through targeting and programmatic buying.

Having completed our overview of the data and datadriven strategy considerations related to the paid, earned and owned media channels, we now turn to several approaches that allow us to begin maximizing the effectiveness of our marketing delivery within and across channels through the delivery of this data.

The following sections are included:

• The Applied Digital Analytics Playbook (ADAP) Part Two
• Data Mining & Data Visualization
• Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning

Analytics is more than just data. Great analysis requires transformation of data to information, of information to knowledge, and hopefully, over time, of knowledge to wisdom. This final chapter is an attempt to share perspectives on our society and the culture of businesses as new sources of knowledge which will hopefully be transformed into wisdom around the practice of analytics.

The following sections are included:

• Conclusion
• Index