As marketers face immense pressure to promise growth, performance-marketing strategies are a tangible way to get there. As a result, Campaign gathers marketing and data experts for the inaugural PM360 conference.Vining is a keynote speaker…
Why is the spotlight on performance marketing?
Savvy brand marketers have always looked to direct-response or performance marketing, for insights into what "works". Customer insight is a way for marketers to boost their credibility and impact in a business while creating value over and above their core role.
Performance marketers, who can better test, quantify, and optimise their work than their peers, are at the forefront of realising this opportunity.
Without giving too much away (but also giving us something juicy), what can we expect to learn from your session?
It’s a deep dive into the hugely successful (and award-winning) campaign we did with Virgin Experience Days at the end of last year. We’re covering attribution, segmentation and activation, creative execution, and testing new media, all to drive meaningful growth in a hugely competitive category.
What’s the biggest challenge surrounding performance marketing – and what most exciting about it?
Brand-owned first-party data is the fuel for most modern marketing and advertising, but an increasingly complex ecosystem of marketing technology fractures and siloes it.
Finding a scalable, efficient way of using first-party data, to build intelligent journeys that drive conversions and profit… that's the biggest challenge and most critical opportunity.
What’s possible with performance today – and what do you hope will be possible in the near future?
A fully integrated measurement model still eludes most advertisers – so I hope that changes.
Marketers need to move from heuristic attribution models (based on assumptions and logic) to an algorithmic model that uses data to assess whether campaigns work. This needs time and confidence to actually happen.
Also, stitching together journeys across walled gardens, in particular the "big three" of Amazon, Google and Facebook remains an unsolved problem.
The most sophisticated marketers are measuring the success of their performance campaigns with profit, not just revenue. With this transparency, they can make investment decisions that deliver real growth – and so turn colleagues in financial and business functions (the budget holders) into allies.
Sam is speaking at Campaign's Performance360 conference on 8 May 2019
