As part of an in-depth look into the performance marketing industry, The Drum caught up with some of the UK's leading performance marketing agencies including A4U, 7thingsmedia, Ve Interactive, AffiliateTraction,ValueClick Media and Webgains.
What is the biggest challenge facing the industry going into 2013?
Chris Johnson, content director, A4u
Education. It’s always a challenge to push the success of performance based marketing to others who don’t have knowledge of what is a fairly new industry. I believe advertisers need to attain a good grounding of the subject in order to become a channel advocate, promote it internally and gain more budget for their activities.
David McDermott, performance director, 7thingsmedia
The biggest challenge comes from within the industry itself. The performance channel has campaigned relentlessly to (quite rightly) be viewed as an all-encompassing sector that brings multiple channel touch points and not to be viewed as a silo. This is now the case, but it cannot be viewed as another media buy; true campaign success is still as a result of hard work and understanding all the intricacies of the channel and how best fit to reach an advertiser’s objectives.
David J Brown, co-founder and CEO, Ve Interactive
It’s two-fold, firstly, the role of agencies versus performance marketers, which is merging and secondly, how both perform when more attributed and segmented data is available. The industry shape will be very different in a year’s time and the winners will be those who swim out to sea and then ride the surf all the way to shore, as opposed to those who are frightened to surf at all for fear of losing sight of the land they know.
Nicky McShane, managing director, AffiliateTraction UK
The key challenge ahead centres around accountability. With tag management and attribution becoming more prevalent, the clock is definitely ticking on the value of all digital channels. The growing focus on data will no doubt help us with this clarity, as although advertisers are regularly using attribution from an internal perspective, it’s only a matter of time before we see brands utilising data more strategically from an external viewpoint and that’s when it will be time for performance to stand up and be counted. It’s therefore imperative we keep a balance on where traffic is coming from and specifically ensure there’s not too much reliance on certain affiliate types. The industry needs to be wise.
Richard Sharp, UK MD, ValueClick Media
In our industry, attribution is always going to be an issue. With the different models available, and publishers offering different things, we need to ensure we are getting attribution models right. Another challenge is cross platform measurement. We need to ensure mobile strategy and affiliate strategy are tied together and there are no breaks in the path to conversion when one user uses multiple devices. There is always a threat that brands will find themselves with dumbed down campaigns that are not delivering the performance and value for money that they could be achieving with the right level of investment in data analytics. So for brands, the biggest challenge is understanding what they are being sold and what the best options for their particular requirements are.
Stephen Kerin, managing director, Webgains UK
The growth in big data has provided brands with a wealth of information on consumer behaviour. For many brands however there is still something of a question over how best to use this data. Over the next year, many advertisers and publishers are likely to invest their energies in finding ways to leverage the rich data available to improve end results. As this begins to happen we are likely to see campaigns become even more tailored for individual consumer behaviour.
This question was asked as part of a performance supplement with the 14 December issue of The Drum.