Digital advertisers chasing ROI at the expense of relevance and customer loyalty, finds Adobe

Advertising and marketing professionals have significantly different priorities when it comes to customer experience because they are working for different internal mandates, says Adobe’s 2019 Digital Trends Advertising in Focus report.

For advertising professionals, the biggest priority for almost half of respondents (46%) is to demonstrate return on investment (ROI) to the rest of the business. This is followed by better audience targeting and segmentation (42% of respondents) and improving channel efficiency (40% of respondents). All of these point to a strategy that prioritises immediate and tangible results – despite the fact that nearly a quarter (23%) stated that the most exciting opportunity for 2019 was data-driven marketing that focuses on the individual first.

In comparison, two-thirds (64%) of marketers stated that content and experience management is a top priority – which falls to less than half of advertisers – as they look to build loyalty and lasting customer relationships.

Sunder Madakshira, Head, Marketing, Adobe India, said, “With the exponential growth of digital technology and the evolving needs of modern customers for more consistent, seamless experiences across their engagement cycle with brands, the role of marketers and advertisers today are becoming more integrated than ever. Brands today, are required to evoke an emotional connect with their customers while combining it with data-driven marketing in order to tailor experiences that drive value and render a significant competitive advantage. Only the businesses who succeed in addressing these evolved requirements of today’s digitally empowered customer across will win in this customer experience era.”

Commenting on connecting creativity and data, Mike Klinkhammer, Director of Advertising Sales EU, eBay, said, “Creativity and metrics are connected. We need to focus much more on quality and relevance – those are two keywords for me this year. If you combine quality and relevance, helped by automation, you get very powerful content delivered in very effective ways.”

This was supported by Chris Hirst, Global CEO of Havas Creative and author of the new book No Bullsh*t Leadership, who remarked: “Smart application of creativity is the way to go. There are occasions when I want ads for a sports shoe brand to be super-sexy and engaging, but there are others when I want to solve a query about why my feet hurt from running. It’s all about context.”

The research suggests that building customer experience strategies is the way forward. Of those surveyed, companies that were centred upon building long-term customer experience were the most successful and were almost three times more likely than their peers to surpass their business goals.

With this in mind, Adobe’s Digital Trends report points to a need for advertising and marketing teams to unite on the customer experience front by bringing together rich audience data and insights, align this with their ad targeting strategies, whilst ensuring the creative connection with the audience is maintained.  

Duffield concluded, “The race to personalise customer experiences has seen brands rely more heavily on analytics and programmatic strategies and whilst these are so important, the opportunity facing the industry is how to balance these with creativity. Those that can root campaigns in deep audience intelligence and marry them with engaging real-time content delivered across the right channels will achieve relevance and personalisation at scale.”

About the Adobe and Econsultancy Digital Trends Report

This is the ninth annual Digital Trends Report from Adobe and Econsultancy, for which more than 12,500 marketing, advertising, ecommerce, creative and technology professionals around the world were surveyed. These findings in this announcement are based on the responses from nearly 800 advertising professionals who took part in the research.

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