Digital Advertising Needs More Focused Attention From Marketers

Digital advertising has been found to waste both the time and money of marketers as they fail to use the channel effectively, Warc reports. Poor execution of digital advertising from professionals in a number of industries will only be turned around if they combine the science of programmatic with a human touch, Ben Wood – global president of iProspect – noted.

Wood, in a self-penned article called ‘The End Of Dumb Digital Marketing’, wrote about how the retargeting of ads that he’d already purchased and irrelevant social media ads based on his social graph were damaging the future of digital advertising. Professionals need to target these issues, and claimed that “assumptions about [digital marketing] are wrong, and its implementation is poor at best.”

Wood went on to note the online ads are hard to remember, but bombarding consumers with the same advert over and over will only serve to annoy them. The frequency of exposure needs to be readdressed and the creativity of such ads needs to be boosted.

Data synchronicity was also listed as an issue, with online behaviour, mobile and offline activity not being co-ordinated appropriately. This, Wood claims, fails to take into account the typical customer journey, with many users conducting online research only to complete a purchase offline – this does not mean that online digital ads should be focused elsewhere and they should actually continue to be suitably targeted.

Merging the different data sets will help provide better insights to marketers and allow for more effective digital ad targeting. This will optimise the customer journey – but marketers must not be over-reliant on technology, he concludes; it is “people that make the difference.”