One Platform, Many Possibilities: Introducing The 2nd Age of AdTech

The world of advertising is evolving at record speed, as a direct result of advancing technology and its influence on consumer needs and desires. As a result, there is a growing disconnect between how brands are developing and delivering advertising, and the way consumers are engaging. While the current economic climate adds a layer of additional complexity to this already fragmented industry—expectations of marketers to do more with less—the only way around this storm is straight through it. Understanding where consumers are is no longer a goal, but table stakes in what we call “The Age of the Omnibrand”. 

In recent years, consumers have shifted their time from surfing the open web to scrolling numerous walled gardens on apps including Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. In fact, recent data shows that consumer time was spread across an average of 8 platforms, with sessions lasting upwards of 30-40 minutes – a 40% increase over the last 5 years. These numbers are only going to increase as we continue to move deeper into our digital-first world. 

What does this mean?

Simply put: for brands, reaching the consumer across these fragmented walled gardens is hard, cutting through the clutter to engage them with agile messaging is extremely challenging, and gathering cohesive, actionable data in this type of siloed environment creates inconsistency and makes it impossible to know what data to trust. 

There are a lot of reasons for this, but a major factor is that despite all the effort going into media, audiences, data and technology to date, the creative has been forgotten. This really matters because creative is responsible for 70% of a campaign’s performance.

Enter The Smartly Digital Advertising Platform

Combining the power of media automation, creative agility and advertising intelligence across the largest media platforms, The Smartly Digital Advertising Platform was built to solve these complex challenges, with an appreciation that core marketer goals never change.

With a single source of truth to understand campaign and creative performance , using first-party data, marketers can now focus more time on driving profitable growth. Unlike the first age of adtech, where marketers made decisions on software vs service—generating many silos—this second age of ad-tech offers a blended delivery model: where service, expertise and partners are seen as an extension of one team to:

• Reach Smartly: Reach audiences where they are, and that means on every media platform across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest and Google. This unites teams and streamlines their workflows to save time and do more with less.
• Engage Smartly: Create beautiful, cohesive, and effective creative that helps deliver relevant content to each consumer that is native to the experience of each platform, providing the full funnel marketing experience that drives action.
• Learn Smartly: Facilitate a constant state of understanding, driven by strong AI insights, to better react to audience behavior on the fly and make data-driven decisions in real-time, maximizing return on investment (ROI).

As we enter 2023, it will be imperative for brands to consistently deliver experiences that give consumers the omnipresent response they seek, in order to capture, and keep, their attention—and that’s not just us saying this. 

In 2021 Boston Consulting Group laid out what was needed for advertisers to accelerate in the complex, ever changing world of digital marketing, and what the business impacts could be. Specifically:

• Automating workflows could lead to an 18 point revenue increase
• Connecting data and teams could lead to cost savings of 29%
• And if you are able to take action with your learnings, you can grow your business 2x

We have carefully and strategically thought about changes to the cookie, measurement, regulation, data privacy, the economy, etc., and this is Smartly.io. thinking about advertising in a slightly different way. A world where media and creative are closer together and the ability to take action with insight is easier.

Our approach leverages the importance of creative tech and AI to power the next 10 years of advertising, because although so much is changing, we understand that marketer’s goals have remained the same.

To learn more, request a platform demo!