Dubai - MENA Herald: Companies that embrace new advertising technologies and understand how they will work in consumers’ everyday lives stand to gain a real first-mover advantage in the coming years. With the third edition of its Targeting Tomorrow conference, recently staged in Dubai, Omnicom Media Group MENA shared best marketing practice shaped by data and technology and set the agenda for marketers.
The audience of 120 marketing and advertising professionals explored innovations and techniques such as tag management analytics, cross-channel and cross-device tracking, chatbots, viewability issues and ad fraud. Other topics of conversation included choosing the right marketing technology partners from the plethora of vendors and machine-learning algorithms. The speaker line-up featured senior executives from Omnicom Media Group’s specialist companies, Resolution, Annalect and Omnicom Media Group Programmatic, global software company Tealium and digital media analytics company Moat.
In his opening keynote, Markus Varsikko, EMEA managing director at Resolution, previewed the future of media, agencies and brands, detailing how business models are evolving and the relationships between them will change. “The role of agencies is altering rapidly, as we now spend 10% of our time planning and 90% optimizing. Today, we are always in beta,” he said. Varsikko also foretold how technology will impact how a brand exists. “A human can’t converse with everyone but a chatbot can. They create a double-digit uplift in conversations,” he commented.
Matt Pilgrim, vice president for partners and alliances at global software company Tealium, shared his six steps to futureproofing marketing strategies, which blend technology with skills and corporate agility. “Centralizing data will give you that single view of a customer across all channels and the ability to tailor your real-time messaging and approach accordingly. Personalization is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity,” he explained.
Annalect’s Raouf Ketani, Resolution’s Adrian Turcsan and Omnicom Media Group’s Christos Solomi covered the best practice and the future of analytics, search and programmatic, demonstrating how these disciplines are transforming marketing with the personalization of messaging. With analytics moving towards harmonized and personalized data, a stepping stone towards predictive modelling, search evolving towards smart tailored content, and programmatic offering sharper targeting opportunities, marketing is certainly getting up, close and personal. This was displayed through live demonstrations of cutting-edge technologies such as facial recognition, mood analysis, chatbots, as well as visualization dashboards.
“Targeting Tomorrow’s focus on a post-digital world illustrates how digital is no longer a specialism but at the core of everything we do,” commented Dimitri Metaxas, regional executive director-specialist companies at Omnicom Media Group MENA. “With developments such as AI and the Internet of Things, marketers are going to have to become fluent in a whole host of new technologies and data sources. Advertisers will begin to unlock that data and develop their own ad tech solutions that not will only rival established media platforms, but potentially even outperform them.”
The 2016 edition of Targeting Tomorrow, annual event series is designed to share all the latest trends, best practice and insights in the digital marketing space, was produced in partnership with MenaMarketPlace, a leading broker between publishers and buyers in the programmatic space. It was also sponsored by Blis Media, Linkdex, Scribble Live and Moat.