Adsquare CEO Tom Laband explains how moment marketing and holistic consumer understanding drive the demand for new data platforms

Data is truly changing modern marketing, and our industry is sitting right in the front row. Today’s advertisers don’t just want to reach the right audience, they want a holistic understanding of their behaviour and to be able to pinpoint them in the crucial ‘mobile moment’ in order to drive advertising relevance.

Doing this effectively requires access to a vast array of multidimensional data and the ability to activate this data in real-time – and this is precisely the requirement that traditional data exchanges simply do not fulfil.

To begin with, a new breed of data exchange must be built mobile-first, and it must support mobile advertising IDs. Given that apps account for 90 per cent of our mobile usage, cookies simply don’t do the job any longer. But mobile-first does not only mean a different identifier, it requires a whole new approach to advertising.

Just think about location data and the ability to connect real-world behaviour and mobile advertising. Understanding the local context and physical behaviour of consumers enables advertisers to derive rich audience profiles. For this reason, a data exchange has to ‘speak’ location fluently, and needs on-boarding functionalities for additional contextual data such as events, weather, household or purchase information.

The right mobile moment
The average smartphone user engages in over 150 sessions with their device per day, each with its own intent, context and immediacy. Marketers have begun to understand that advertising relevance is all about delivering the right message in the right mobile moment.

The foundation for this is the availability of rich data, both audience information and context data, in real-time, and this is why data exchanges have to go beyond traditional data selling, to make data accessible in real-time. This requires deep integrations with programmatic buying platforms – so called ‘pre-bid’ integrations – which enrich the bid stream on the fly.

These mobile moments create thousands of data points every day. Making these available to advertisers helps them build a holistic picture of, and to get closer to, their target audience. Take app data, which has the potential to add a whole new level of granularity to audience targeting. Because app developers can draw from their direct relationship to their customers, they have deep insights into their interests, preferences and patterns. This is why a new breed of data exchange has to go beyond location to cover all kinds of mobile data, including in-app usage.

Dealing with data
To make all these data assets available, this new breed of data exchange must offer data providers a secure environment that protects their data from misuse. This is where the ability to enable private deals can give providers full control and transparency over who uses their data and for what purpose. These private marketplace features, which we already know from premium inventory in media buying, are the foundation for data owners – including app developers – to activate first-party data for programmatic advertising.

Today, both data providers and advertisers demand sophisticated self-service tools that give them full transparency and let them take control. To meet this growing demand, the industry needs a platform that is seamlessly accessible, and which offers tools for data onboarding as well as data buying, complex audience modelling and detailed reporting. Keep in mind that today’s agencies and trading desks are programmatic pros and know the pitfalls of buying black box audiences in a managed service.

In the age of moment marketing and holistic consumer understanding, static and unsophisticated data exchanges inherited from the online advertising world no longer fit the demand. A next generation of platforms opens the door to a new realm of opportunities and – ultimately – equips marketers to deliver engaging and effective advertising that goes far beyond location.

This sponsored article first appeared in the September 2016 print edition of Mobile Marketing. You can read the whole issue here.