What is MADtech and why should you care?
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June 16, 2019
Over the last few years the business of marketing has completely changed. Shoppers have wised up to a century of spin and learned to ignore hyperbole in advertising.
Exaggerated claims have been further undermined by social media which applies the scrutiny of the crowd. We have entered a new era where marketing succeeds when it is totally transparent – conveying only facts coated with emotion rather than untruths wrapped in fiction.
Marketers are further challenged by consumers who are now trying to have real time conversations with the brands that they love. Gone are the cosy days of throwing a few TV spots to the braying masses during the year.
Now they all want to chat directly – one-to-one.
The world has become a very noisy, complicated place. Brands have to struggle to get people to remember anything about them. To make sure your marketing is effective, it needs to be routed in clear, honest values. Values shape customer experiences. And experiences shape sales. One person’s shared experience defines another’s perception of a brand.
Which is why Customer Experience, some argue, is the new marketing.
Consumers have never been more demanding. Once one brand innovates, they expect others to follow.
Uber, Tesla, Netflix are redefining markets and customer’s expectations. Brands need to understand their customers’ needs, wants, journeys – better than ever before. And thanks to MadTech, now they can.
Consumers have never been more demanding. Once one brand innovates, they expect others to follow.
MadTech is the confluence of Marketing, Advertising and Technology. It’s possibly the most important space in business right now because successful deployment of the right tools and strategies can smash your competition and disrupt a whole marketplace.
Thanks to technology, big brands have literally, warehouses filled with data – demographic and geographic information, order history, buying preferences, even product research and purchase intent.
When this data is combined, marketers can form a much richer picture of the audiences to target – what offers would be most relevant to them, when they are most likely to buy, and the optimal combination of marketing tactics required for success.
Technology never stands still. It’s gobbling up traditional media. YouTube now has over 1 billion active users. In the U.S., it reaches more adults than any cable network. For many, YouTube is television but it’s non-linear and so offers more viewing than a whole country could watch in a lifetime. Last year, brands virtually doubled the amount of money spent on online video – the bulk of which was bought programmatically.
In other words, using algorithms and ‘bots’ to target audiences with much more precision than by buying spots on broadcast television.
A recent survey by Deloitte uncovered that video-streaming services such as Netflix, are now used by more than 42% of American households, overtaking live television as the viewing method of choice. If you’re a millennial (born after 1980) the chances are you now watch more TV shows (not just YouTube) on a mobile device than on an old school television. 57% of all millennials’ viewing is confined to the small screen.
While you’re out and about, a slew of proximity and geolocation technologies (BLE, NFC, RFID) and mobile/smartphone advances, mean it’s increasingly easy to track your activity in the physical world. Where you go, what you do, who you do it with. By overlaying this data on your social media history, your personal preferences and your buying history, it’s possible to build a behavioral profile of staggering granularity.
MadTech marketers are already building systems to automate customer engagements derived from this kind of insight. They’re serving up unique experiences and hyper-personalization at the right time and in the right context, for every customer.
Machine learning and artifcial intelligence are helping to go further still and predict what you might want to buy before you’ve even decided to go shopping.
As in human partnerships, successful brands of the future will ‘converse’ with us, at moments that matter using a rich repertoire of emotions. This new, caring, relationship means that brands will belong to their customers, not the other way around. But the relationships themselves will be crafted, nurtured and valued thanks to the innovation and ingenuity that we refer to as MadTech.
It’s here to stay.
