I recently presented for the first time in Sydney, Australia at an iAB Australia event on the evolution of programmatic. As I have been doing off late, I emphasized the need to bring the human back into the technology world, whether that’s MarTech or AdTech (personally i don’t isolate these as different worlds). It was covered in an article from AdNews, here is a sneak peak but you can click here to view the original version:
It’s a daunting world for the modern day marketer, but it needn’t be if they weren’t so “channel obsessive”.
At a packed out Programmatic Summit in Sydney this morning, global head of marketing technology and innovation at Kimberly-Clark (US), Mayur Gupta, said marketers must quit being so channel obsessed. He added that finding the human within ad tech was the key to success.
He said major shifts need to take place in order to bring the focus back to the consumer – not the marketing channel.
“There is a channel obsession, with people saying things like ‘mobile first’. The bottom line is we are thinking channels and that is the huge fundamental gap,” Gupta said.
“We’ve lost the concept of the human as we are so focused on the channel.”
He said the industry’s inability to connect the dots is its downfall.
While Gupta argues that programmatic is a mindset, he said the focus on silo channels needs to change and it’s the consumer that is the “missing linchpin”- not the next big buzzword channel.
“It’s easy thinking of channels separately – having media here content there but the real magic happens when all of these pieces come together.”
Responding to questions about the company’s programmatic activity, Gupta said Kimberly-Clark uses an agency trading desk and has no plans to move this in-house.
“We use agency partners for our trading desk and have no plans to bring this in-house,” he said.
“It’s a hybrid model and it works well for us so we will stick with it.”
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