For some time now, marketers from all industries have been observing a phenomenon of our time: there is more content, channels, and end devices than ever before – and new platforms are constantly being added.
In addition, there are changes in the data landscape: the total amount, granularity, and quality of available data that marketers can use to develop relevant data-driven marketing strategies are changing.
New regulations, such as the elimination of third-party cookies, Apple's tracking changes, or the enforcement of the GDPR in Europe are just a few examples.
Together with the ever-growing amount of data, this ensures that, according to our survey, 33% of the CMOs questioned said they did not trust their data – which they receive as a basis for making decisions about campaigns.
Current challenges in campaign reporting at RTL Germany
RTL Germany also saw this challenge and looked for a new partner who could map the complexity of the ever-increasing diversity and digitalization in performance marketing. The broadcasting group has developed massively in recent years and has gone from being a former broadcasting company to a data company whose product portfolio goes beyond classic linear TV.
Due to the ever-increasing digitalization of its own products, performance marketing must now also react in order to be able to measure campaign success across all channels. The broad set of players, channels, and campaign types, as well as the broad growth of creative forms, have made consistent reporting difficult in recent years.
The amount of data to be processed can no longer be mapped correctly by manual reporting, and the duplication of channels through both web and app presences poses an additional challenge.
To be specific: this means that with 20 KPIs from 200 campaigns and 3000 ad groups, 15 connectors, and 60 accounts, about 180,000 lines would have to be written manually per day to create a report. The sheer volume of data is no longer manageable manually.
Did you know that 42% of marketing data analysts say they spend too much time manually wrangling data?
Find out more in the Adverity 2022 Marketing Analytics State of Play Report
Freeing resources and creating transparency with automated reporting
Joining forces with Adverity, RTL tackled these challenges and developed an automated reporting process. Adverity’s intelligent marketing platform automatically submits data daily via the various APIs of the individual marketers and measurement partners of the broadcasting group. It will then harmonize and structure this data and transfer it back into the RTL cosmos.
Here, the data can now be accessed by all departments in a central data pool which creates many advantages. The automated process not only saves time and resources, which can now be spent on value-adding activities but also ensures that all relevant stakeholders have access to the data at all times. This not only creates transparency, but also a flexibility that is not possible with manual reporting, which has to be requested again and again.
Furthermore, this "single source of truth" ensures up-to-date reporting, which not only takes into account data from performance campaigns but also ensures a fusion of brand and performance campaigns, which in turn provides holistic data for efficient decision-making and performance measurement. The times when brand and performance marketing were thought of separately are over.
The goal of the partnership, to create an overarching, automated reporting system in which the various channels and data sources, combined from a brand and performance perspective, can be accessed on a daily basis and then matched with the on-site data to monitor the success and efficiency of each campaign on a daily basis, has been achieved.
Single source of truth for brand and performance marketing
Marketers in other industries face similar challenges. A single source of truth seems to be something that would already break down many barriers in campaign reporting. “At the moment, I get different PDFs or Excel sheets from different agencies, and the numbers have to be optimized in a business tool, which can lead to a lot of mistakes and requires a lot of resources,” says Lisa Steinhauer, former Marketing Manager at BMW and now responsible for the Staff Function Digitalisation in the APAC and EMEA regions with the Bavarian car manufacturer. She sees the Single Source of Truth as an opportunity to optimize resources and massively simplify reporting.
The approach of thinking brand and performance marketing together is also already very popular. André Vieregge, Managing Director of SYZYGY Performance Marketing, says: “For many products, the success of performance marketing depends very much on what the brand preference looks like, and vice versa, performance marketing naturally contributes something to brand perception. From there, one can't do without the other and this realization needs to be carried into a common KPI framework.” Because both the performance marketer and the brand marketer need numbers to work with. The difference is that the performance marketer expects to be able to measure them directly in order to then derive KPIs, optimize them, and adjust them if necessary. The performance of the campaign then pays directly into the brand value.
“These are processes that I still see far too little, but which I consider essential,” says Vieregge. “In my understanding, in the digital world there is no brand and product world as such, the potential customer doesn't perceive it separately anyway, and that's why it has to be managed together and evaluated together.”
Marketers not only have to deal with ever-changing guidelines but also have to cope with a generally growing complexity and connectivity in performance marketing. Marketed products are becoming more and more digital, high measurability of channels is expected and assumed by superiors and customers, while the amount of data to be processed is exploding.
The case of RTL has shown that automating processes is essential to eliminate manual errors, free up resources and create transparency – also towards stakeholders. An essential part of this is the creation of a single source of truth that enables brand and performance marketing to be thought together.
You can find the whole masterclass with RTL Germany here.
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