Session Recap

Adtech: Emerging Trends and Methods

October 7, 2021 — Experts Adam Cox of YETI and Nicolette Harper of Marriott International divulge how their highly distinct and diverse companies pivoted tactics and expanded reach during challenging times, thanks to the flexibility afforded by their respective adtech stacks. They share their innovative processes and platforms—and how they got the entire team on board.

Featured Experts

Adam Cox

Director of Ecommerce, Data, and Analytics

YETI

Nicolette Harper

VP of Global Marketing and Media

Marriott International

Framework:

Adtech implementation begins with a thought exercise exploring these questions:

Who am I targeting? – The audience may be anonymous, but third-party behavioral data can fill in some of the gaps.
In what context? – Customers may have different needs based on their communities, interests, or stages of their respective customer journeys.
With what goal in mind? – E.g. delivering the products and messages that further your business interests.

Adtech answers the question: how will I identify and manage all relevant audiences and personas? Once these have been sorted, adtech tools allow professionals the opportunity to:

Emerging Trends and Methods in Adtech

The adtech and martech landscape is dense and still rapidly growing—from about 150 platforms in 2011 to over 8,000 in 2020.

This includes content management platforms specialized for managing product information and sales (e.g. digital asset managers and product information managers, or DAMs and PIMS respectively).
Separately, analytics platforms like Google Analytics provide tools for segmentation and data insights. Your taxonomy will likely include both content and data analysis platforms, so ensure they are compatible and have appropriate integrations.
By creating a model of your data structure and journey, you can determine which platforms fit best for each step. See Adam Cox’s model of YETI’s adtech landscape in the video for an elegant example.
Similarly, where identity solutions are necessary, more than one is usually required. As such, a primary challenge is stitching them together sensically and securely.

Adtech allows for segmentation of customers based on their specific interests and communities.

Adtech tools also provide businesses opportunities to be as programmatic—and therefore agile—as possible.

Using AI tools to determine ad spending amounts—by incorporating a digital media planner, for instance—may save money and maximize impact.
Responding to sudden shifts in supply and demand requires programmatic adtech tools that can automate budget and content delivery decisions precisely when needed.
Many content delivery processes can be made programmatic, including the ad creation itself (see Nicolette Harper’s fascinating discussion on dynamic creative tools that logically splice together existing ads based on performance).

Discussion and Takeaways: Advice from our Experts

Both of our experts discussed the technical challenges and demands of implementing adtech, and despite their unique business needs had some similar tips. Here’s how they summed up their advice:

Harper: The biggest piece of advice is do not underestimate bringing your leaders along on your journey. Seek leadership buy-in toward building new tech and bring the rest of your team along to understand why and how change is happening. Becoming best friends with your Privacy and Legal departments will help manage necessary data agreements during the long process of building adtech.

Cox: Educating your executive team on what machine learning means for your company is rewarding but can be a challenge—be patient! Make sure your Privacy and Legal departments understand your adtech stack and how it satisfies their requirements by taking the time to build understandable system documentation throughout.