According to Ad Exchanger’s Industry Preview, native ads and header bidding are a few of the “shiny new objects” in the Ad Tech space this year. There’s been a lot of “rolling disclosure” around the effectiveness (or lack thereof), in Native, but are the brands and agencies really doing anything more than testing at this point? Header bidding seems to be gaining momentum as the infrastructure is starting to catch up. Metrics on true effectiveness are still pending.
A third that should not be ignored is Account-Based Marketing (ABM). ABM is the latest approach to targeting a prospect in the B2B environment, however, implementing a digital ABM strategy is far from simple. Success is critically dependent on extensive unique user reach, and real transparency to the quality of the prospect pool.
Essentially, ABM works by flipping the sales funnel upside down. In a B2B business model, ABM aims to find members of an offline prospect company online and target them through various tactics including display ads, email campaigns, and video ads. The idea of reaching these decision makers online is effective in theory because of the potential for scale, however, you must have total transparency throughout the process to ensure you are in fact reaching your target audience. Doing this in a cookie-based system reduces scale and nearly eliminates transparency.
In order for Account-Based Marketing to thrive in the Ad Tech world, it needs to be applied in a cookie-free environment. While cookies are commonly used in targeting consumer audiences, the plumbing doesn’t translate when you go to build a map between offline to online prospects. In addition, based on what we know about data onboarding, the match rate of most CRM cookie files is only around 30%. The last point here is there’s no ability to provide matchback reporting to prove that your target audience is the target audience that has been reached.
It is no wonder then that companies are making the shift to IP targeting, using the Semcasting Smart Zones platform. To ensure 100% audience reach across multiple devices – company networks, home offices, and mobile devices – companies are embracing alternative methodologies when it comes to ABM. IP Addresses are persistent, making targeting and true audience transparency and matchback possible.
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Semcasting has been an industry leader in audience building, onboarding, and qualification since 2009. We built our own robust database of consumers and businesses, supported by a patented predictive modeling technology. Our IP onboarding and qualification technology — Smart Zones — is backed by an initial patent granted in 2014 and a continuation patent granted in 2016 for device analytics and attribution in support of the Internet of Things. Semcasting's Smart Zones technology is unique in that it allows for far more granular onboarding and targeting when compared to other IP-Geo services — being several thousand times more accurate than a zip-code on average. Our mobile targeting technology, Mobile Footprints, covers 125+ million mobile devices with the ability to map every identified device back to any other location visited over the last 7 to 90 days.