Digital Marketing Technology Might be Smart but it has No Common Sense
Digital marketing technology continues to get more refined from year to year. Sophisticated algorithms and stream lined tools help digital marketers cover more channels than they ever could in the past. However, the sheer bandwidth that digital marketing allows a marketer to take on, often prevents them from reviewing how smart the technology really is. Unfortunately, when an analysis is undertaken, it’s not uncommon for digital marketers to find that digital marketing technology is really smart about delivering on its intended purpose, but applies its capabilities without any common sense.
It’s no secret that this is the busiest time of year for retailers. Retail digital marketers do extensive planning to set channels, calendars, and targets that all get executed between Thanksgiving (or before) and Christmas. It’s also the best time of year to witness digital marketing systems under stress tests as they deliver these aggressive marketing strategies.
Here are two examples of “smart” technology behaving densely.
Email Overload
Every year, I buy a sampler pack of cigars for a family member. In the last several years, I’ve bought this gift from the same retailer. Like any good smart technology system, my purchases and preferences were saved to my profile and undoubtedly assigned to a particular communication plan.
My assumption is that purchasing sampler packs assigned me to several marketing profiles because the individual products in those packs were all likely tagged separately to populate the companies CMS. The result was that I received five emails from this company in about an hour. Two of the offers contradicted one another and none of the offers could be used in conjunction.
The obvious lack of common sense is sending that many emails in such a short time frame. But even the purchasing proposition was absurd. I would need to make four separate purchases with separate shipping costs within a day to take advantage of the Calls to Action.
Ads for What I just Bought
Search engines and social media platforms allow marketers to pay for ads that are specifically served to people that have past buying behavior or profile setting indicating they are interested in a particular product or service. It’s a brilliant way to use general demographic information to narrow down to an individual who likely wants a particular offer rather than making the ad available to a general population where the majority of the audience has no interest. That is, until the ad system misses critical information like recent purchases.
Every gift I’ve bought online has had ads served up to me for at least a week after buying it. In some cases, even the retailer I bought from continues to serve up ads as they are using a third party system or don’t include purchased items as a filter for removing ads Consumable items might make sense to continue advertising but most of my items are toys purchased for my children, nieces, or nephews. A smart system that tries to sell an item to someone who just bought it shows a real lack of common sense.
These systems will continue to improve. In the case of purchase history, there are already platforms that are leveraging completed buying data to stop serving ads for a period of time until the person is likely to need to buy it again. No matter how sophisticated the technology gets, digital marketers need to review the processes carefully to identify these bone-headed gaps. Even if a digital marketer doesn’t have an immediate solution to the problem, simply being aware of it can help you factor in the cost and counter-measures for the systems lack of common sense.