AI, Clean Rooms, and CLV — oh my! No matter where you look these days, it seems marketers are facing a barrage of buzzwords in their email inboxes and news headlines. The question is, which of these terms are just smoke and mirrors, and which are actually worth the hype?  When you’re evaluating the usefulness of new marketing measurement technology, the answer to that question is key.

Unpacking Marketing Technology Buzzwords

Here’s our take on which martech buzzwords are worth your time and energy and which ones are largely just fluff.

Artificial Intelligence

Our Take: Worth Exploration, but Proceed with Caution

The use of artificial intelligence in marketing technology tools has fast become the standard. Generative AI tools are particularly useful for marketers because they provide an opportunity to improve both internal operations as well as external activations. However, AI is not a quick or catch-all solution. It’s essential for organizations to consider the range of emerging AI applications to determine how to best leverage AI tools and where human review, creativity, or other involvement is still a requirement.

Here are a few applications of artificial intelligence to consider and explore:

• Brainstorming: utilize tools like ChatGPT to help supplement the brainstorming and problem-solving process.
• Summarization and Internal Organization: help summarize or explain complex processes and topics. Utilize language models like GPT-4 in internal systems to automate tasks and increase team efficiency.
• Creative: increase the volume of creative assets through automation in the creative development process, or dynamically update and personalize creative assets using generative AI.
• Developing Insights: integrate large language models with performance data to generate deeper and additional insights.

As always, we believe that any tech is only as useful as your ability to harness it, so be sure that you have a plan for how you’ll make the most of these new capabilities.

Personalization

Our Take: Worth the Hype, but Proceed with Caution

Personalization efforts can greatly enhance the customer experience and improve engagement, but marketers need to ensure they strike the right balance between creating a positive ad experience and respecting the privacy of their customers. In one study conducted in the UK, the top reason consumers revoked consent for a brand to utilize their data was due to their ads and marketing being overly intrusive.

Customer segmentation and other customer insights can be used to create tailored content, provide more relevant product recommendations, and enhance targeting efforts across channels. As organizations delve more into this space, however, they should ensure they are respecting privacy by providing transparency to customers into how their data will be used and enabling options for customers to control their preferences.

Clean Rooms

Our Take: Worth Exploration

A clean room is a secure and privacy-friendly method for data sharing which allows first-party data from one entity to be combined with third-party data from another entity, without exposing consumer-level data to either party.

Clean rooms tout the ability to scale customer-based marketing measurement and activation in a privacy-compliant way, but the dust is still settling in terms of which clean room providers will come out on top. We know that privacy concerns and regulations are here to stay, so it’s important for brands to start testing and learning with these new capabilities sooner rather than later. When considering where to start, we recommend first ensuring your internal systems and data architecture are in a good spot. A clean room won’t be particularly useful if your internal customer data is not mature or architected in a useful way. Once your internal data is set up for success, we recommend brainstorming your key use cases for clean rooms and identifying a provider with which to conduct an initial test.  

Incrementality

Our Take: Worth the Hype!

Incrementality is the additional business value caused by your media efforts, or in other words, revenue that would not have occurred without the presence of media.

For any organization looking to maximize the impact of their marketing investment on the bottom line, the concept of incrementality is truly a must. Whether you measure incrementality through in-market testing or media modeling (hint: we recommend both!), it provides the clearest understanding of whether your efforts are driving additional value for your business.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Our Take: Worth the Hype!

CLV refers to the estimated total value that a customer will generate for a business over their entire duration of their relationship with the brand.  We strongly believe in the importance of measuring and making strategic decisions based on some understanding of the long-term value that a new customer brings to your business.

Without this concept, marketers risk making decisions based on short-term performance gains while sacrificing long-term business growth and profitability. An understanding of Customer Lifetime Value enables more holistic and improved decision-making, enabling marketers to consider the strength of specific channels or tactics in driving new customers.

Unified Measurement

Our Take: Consider if It Makes Sense for Your Specific Needs

The sheer number of available marketing measurement methodologies and tools can be overwhelming for any marketer. When an organization is making use of multiple methods and tools, it can be challenging to make decisions if those tools are providing conflicting results (which they often do).

Unified Measurement Models fully integrate multiple marketing measurement methodologies in a comprehensive and cohesive way.  This approach can provide much needed clarity and improved decision-making. If you’re unsure if a unified approach is right for you, take a closer look at various marketing measurement solutions.

Server-Side Tagging

Our Take: Consider if It Makes Sense for Your Specific Needs

Server-side tagging is a method for implementing analytics or advertising pixels that reduces reliance on client-side technologies like JavaScript and minimizes data discrepancies caused by browser variations.  This method has emerged as an alternative to client-side tagging and advocates tout it for providing enhanced data accuracy, data loss mitigation, privacy compliance, and improved site performance.

That being said, server-side tagging can be mistaken for a silver bullet for data loss due to third-party cookie deprecation. While server-side tracking doesn’t fully address user identification gaps like cookie loss, it can help close some gaps where platforms depend on capturing events and conversions. In other words, server-side tracking can ensure the capture of all conversions on a site but doesn’t facilitate connecting those conversions to specific customers. We recommend brands utilize a hybrid approach that combines the strengths of both pixel-based and server-side tracking methodologies.

Beyond the Buzz: Martech That Measures What Matters

For the most part, these martech buzzwords all have value — so long as you understand what each signifies and how to put them into practice. When you’re evaluating a new marketing measurement technology, keep your brand’s unique needs and primary KPIs in mind. This will help narrow your list down to the right tool. And if you’re looking for a solution that checks all the boxes, consider Ovative’s Modern MMM+, an award-winning analytics platform that provides the most comprehensive view of a marketing program, enabling smarter actions and driving Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR). Contact us to learn more.