It has been a long time coming, but the advent of single-stack digital marketing platforms is finally upon us, and is paying off. The advantages of integrating an adserver, attribution tool, verification, programmatic buying and search bid management into a single-source platform provides unparalleled efficiencies in productivity within digital teams. Recent research done by the Boston Consulting Group shows that using a unified platform for ad serving and lean technology will show resource-productivity improvements for up to 33%.
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These productivity improvements are purely based on improvements in workflow, reducing doubling down on tasks such as pixel creation, trafficking and de-duplicating results and can centralize the decision-making mechanisms in ways never possible before. In an increasingly complex and more dynamic online ecosystem being agile in terms of creation, analysis but also operations is becoming increasingly challenging, and a unified technology stack can be a huge help in making your teams as effective as possible. Imagine what that 33% time savings could mean in terms of capacity to deep-dive into data analysis, campaign optimization and ROI management.
I fully believe the amount of data required to effectively advertise online will continue to grow, and the battle of the machines will turn into the battle of efficiencies — not only the machines and algorithms matter, but who controls them and how easily they are controlled will play a pivotal role in making digital teams and agencies, publishers and advertisers ready for the data-driven, multi-screen, cross-channel world ahead of us.
Both effectiveness and efficiency are words successful online marketing teams will need to embrace if they want a prosperous future. Where effectiveness is centered around the end result of all steps taken in the process, efficiency focuses on these individual steps in the process to ensure optimum output with the least amount of resources required, be it time or people. Short-term effectiveness does not mean an efficient organisation, and a full efficiency focus does not mean effective online marketing. The two are fully intertwined, and the platform that solves both issues is the online marketeer’s knight in shining armor.
If you are a modern-day digital agency or advertiser and have no philosophy in how to unify your different teams and online marketing channels within a unified tech stack, it’s high time to start scoping out possibilities and shaping your online future. If you don’t, your competitors will.
