Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2

The last session I attended was the final keynote of the day: It’s All About Targeting. There were a few introductory slides for this one but it was mostly couches and moderated discussion with some audience Q&A. The participants were from the NYT, Hyundai America and EchoTarget and it definitely had a more "we’re the big dogs" feel. A lot of this session reiterated things I’ve heard and written about before. Some of the critical points, though:

• Your creative must match your targeting and your channel. They’re synergistic and if any part is wrong, the campaign will not perform as well as it should.
• Use multi-channel and multi-targeting approaches to reach the right people at the right time.
• Your customers’ non-personally identifiable information is important - use it appropriately.

There were two quotes out of this session that I loved. The first was about privacy concerns and the point was made that most of the information that can be legitimately gathered and used has been available and used off-line for a very long time - only sharing methods have really changed, not the information available.  However, because awareness has risen, customers are becoming concerned about what is known about them. The gathering of legitimate and openly available customer data "shouldn’t be a concern but since it is a concern to our customers, it must be our concern, too."

"We need to monitor ourselves and our industry." -Greg Smith, EchoTarget

Three summary points from the session:

• Try different approaches but define your targeting data carefully
• Test and Optimize
• Match the Message to the Channel