Matthew Biboud Lubeck, VP EMEA, Amperity, offers valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
In the face of ongoing economic uncertainty, brands are gearing up for a pivotal year in 2024 with a strategic emphasis on growth. While there will be many opportunities to drive profitable growth, one key theme emerges: privacy prioritisation. Strong privacy foundations enable accurate measurement while building consumer trust.
Research demonstrates that only 3 per cent of consumers feel in control of their data online. Yet trust is crucial to driving customer loyalty and growth. In fact, 43 per cent of people say they’d switch from their preferred brand to a second-choice brand if the latter provided a good privacy experience.
From the strategic adoption of zero-copy data practices to the intersection of customer experience aspirations with data management realities and the ever-evolving landscape of AI ethics and regulations, the year ahead promises to reshape how we approach these critical facets. Let’s dive into the practical implications and emerging trends that will redefine marketing strategies, offering valuable insights into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
- Zero Copy Data: Data Should Live in Fewer Places
The paid media and advertising landscape is poised for a transformative shift, driven by a recognition of the limitations in current practices. A key trend emerging in the coming year is the adoption of a zero-copy data philosophy. This approach signifies a strategic move towards centralising customer information and minimising data duplication across platforms.
Marketers will strategically embrace data minimisation in response to challenges posed by privacy regulations and consumer dissatisfaction with intrusive tracking. The industry will shift away from scattered and duplicated data sources, opting for a zero-copy data philosophy that prioritises efficient and non-redundant data access.
This transformation will extend to a comprehensive revamping of the data ecosystem, with a focus on aligning practices with the zero-copy data philosophy. Advertisers and data management platforms will reassess bidding language and communication protocols to ensure privacy and prevent data leakage.
Identity resolution will become a central focus, with advertisers seeking accurate and comprehensive first-party data to build unified customer profiles. This shift aims to address challenges arising from data deprecation and ensure a more reliable and consistent approach to customer identity.
In adopting these strategies, businesses can anticipate improved conversion rates, increased return on ad spend and reduced timelines, costs and risks associated with data management. Next year ushers in a paradigm shift towards zero-copy data practices, where businesses prioritise streamlined, non-redundant data access to enhance customer experiences and align with evolving regulatory and consumer expectations.
- The Reality of the Personalisation Dream
In the coming year, we anticipate a growing realisation among brands that the aspiration for a seamless and personalised customer experience must be closely tied to effective data management and identity capabilities. While many brands may continue to showcase their “personality dream” through impressive customer journeys, we predict an increasing awareness that the actualisation of this dream hinges on addressing underlying data challenges.
Organisations will recognise the imperative to break down silos that separate data management, identity verification and customer experience teams. They will actively work towards integrating these components, acknowledging that a cohesive approach is vital for delivering the level of personalisation and efficiency customers expect. As a result, brands will invest more in modernising their data infrastructure, linking systems and training teams to utilise data accurately.
The shift will be from presenting an idealised version of customer journeys to actively resolving the practical challenges in data management and identity verification that often impede the achievement of a truly seamless customer experience. The coming year requires a transformation in mindset, recognising that the success of the “personality dream” is contingent upon addressing the intricacies of data, identity and customer interactions in a more integrated and strategic manner.
- Embrace the AI Advantage (but don’t completely let go of the steering wheel)
In 2024, marketers must push the boundaries of AI adoption to improve the customer experience – scaling hyper-personalisation by integrating AI across ecosystems. Yet, many marketers continue to face a fundamental problem: How do they deliver a personalised experience to millions of customers? And how do we explain the role of AI to consumers so transparency is maintained, especially in the context of the new European Artificial Intelligence Act (if you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ll know I VERY much support any legislation that improves digital accountability and ethical behaviours)?
AI will play a significant role in enabling hyper-personalisation by leveraging data analysis, predictive algorithms and machine learning to tailor experiences, offers and messaging to individual preferences and behaviours with efficiency and speed.
However, marketers need to know what questions to ask to reap the full benefits of AI. Therefore, “prompt engineering” will become a critical skill. This refers to deliberately crafting prompts or input queries to elicit specific responses or behaviours from AI models. Marketers should understand the capabilities and limitations of the AI model, and then tailor prompts to achieve their desired outcomes.
Of course, this can only be done effectively with accurate data. If the data feeding the AI is dirty or incomplete, marketers run the risk of receiving inaccurate insights that can impact their strategies and outcomes. By using AI’s predictive capabilities fed with accurate data, marketers can improve the customer experience and help brands collect and retain customers.
In this new landscape, marketers must also evolve their roles to become AI governors. This will allow them to become creative about applying AI throughout the marketing process while retaining checks and balances to remain accountable for AI-powered experiences. If done correctly, AI can help add significant speed, ease and improved performance across campaign and audience strategies. I predict we will increasingly lighten human intervention across more of these workflows, but not in the first few years of experimentation.
