Do you work in media sales, or more specifically in digital media sales? Whether it is your sole responsibility or part of it, you need a minimum amount of knowledge about the ad tech and marketing tech your company employs and that which your competitors and clients use. You also need an understanding of the other marketing-related technologies, systems, and tools used by your company, competition, and clients to fully understand the opportunities at your fingertips and how clients really track what they measure.

Article revised March 28, 2022

Types of tech in marketing:

There are in fact a great number of systems that are brought to bear on any one particular campaign to ensure it properly fits predictive marketing modeling, delivers the proper type of ad creative to the desired audience accurately and at the right rate. There are reporting systems that validate whether delivered ad impressions were legitimately delivered. Here is the latest marketing technology landscape – click on it to see the original.

This series of blog articles will expand on each type of marketing tech, in so far as there is a reason for media salespeople to know about them.

Marketing Management Tech

Integrated Marketing Management

IMMs are complete marketing activity planning, management, and reporting solutions. They connect financial components with sales, media, call centers, your website for customer servicing & follow-ups and analytics, and many other systems that may be required in a medium to large size company.

These are very comprehensive systems that require much planning, consideration, and modeling prior to selecting which one is right for any given company, and some time to install and onboard all departments to use it.

Once it is running, it provides its users with advanced analytics enabling them to determine marketing ROI for every activity performed, determine the lifetime value of client types, and any other metrics of interest to the company – because the system tracks and reports it all.

Few media operators and advertising agencies use these solutions fully. Some use them for their accounting and HR components but haven’t customized them for media management and sales force automation.

The principal integrated marketing management solution vendors are SAS, Oracle, Orbis Software, Allocadia, IBM, Teradata, SAP to name but a few.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRMs are also known as Social CRM, Sales Force Automation (SFA), and Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions. All essentials serve the same purpose while having slightly different options. They manage all contacts with whom a company is engaged by tracking activity with them. This is done through tracking emails, calls, transactions, opportunities, leads, etc. Media organizations use these to track media sales and opportunities. Ad agencies use these to manage their relationships with their clients and suppliers. Advertisers use them to track activity with their clients the consumers or businesses they deal with.

These systems offer complete reporting of the buying and selling process, so long as they are properly set up. They plug into a host of other systems such as eCommerce, web analytics, eLearning, finance, HR, etc…

The principal CRM and SFA solutions out there are the following: Salesforce, Netsuite, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SAP, Nimble, Sage, Pega, Highrise, Zoho, Steelwedge. There are easily a dozen more that are just as good.

Marketing Automation

Also known as Inbound Marketing solutions, marketing automation may seem just like customer relationship marketing or management. However, it is slightly different. Actually, it precedes it in the buying process. Oftentimes this confusion arises from the fact that many CRMs also engage in some marketing automation, and vice versa.

Marketing automation solutions automate digital marketing communications throughout the early stages of the buying process. It collects a lead’s contact information through online forms and interprets the consumer’s place in the purchase funnel. They then automates the sending of emails and calls to those prospects with the initial request as a starting point. It attempts to lead them towards a sale. At some point in the process, the marketing automation solution hands over the lead to a sales representative through their CRM once that lead has been properly qualified.

Marketing automation solutions connect to CRM, SFA, integrated marketing management solutions, your web analytics, and CMS.

Some of the principal solutions include Eloqua, Marketo, HubSpot, Adobe Campaign, Sitecore, InfusionSoft, Manticore from SalesEngine (build on Microsoft Dynamics)…

Note that Oracle owns Eloqua as part of their enterprise stack.

Visualization / Dashboards

Visualization tools are business intelligence systems that create dashboards of your KPIs from across all relevant marketing data sources. By data sources, I mean spreadsheets, cloud-based apps, on-premise data, data warehouses, databases, and social media, as well as all the other systems mentioned above and in the coming posts. They literally pull data from any source and combine them if necessary to show you how things are going.

These solutions can easily manage the scale and complexity of all of your data. They offer flexible layouts and labeling options to ensure your dashboards meet your needs. They also update themselves as you require them to. Most have mobile apps which allow you to see your key metrics at any time, from anywhere.

The principal solution providers of visualization dashboards are DOMO, Cognos (owned by IBM), Leftronic, Good Data, SimplyMeasured, Chart.io, SAS Visual Analytics, SAP Lumira, iDashboards, InetSoft, Tableau Software,  Dundas…

Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM)

Marketing mix modeling is another type of business intelligence solution that integrates all of your historical campaign data. This includes everything from syndicated media research data, to site analytics and eCommerce. It even includes in-store POS and foot traffic count to map marketing performance against the specific marketing mix used. For example, a particular weight and period in television, for one campaign which yielded X results online and offline. You would input this data for your campaigns from the past x-years.

It differentiates between total, base and incremental sales; between media and marketing spend by channel. The more campaigns and results you can feed the system, the better your outcome modeling will be. This will enable it to tell you what would happen in a given campaign if you remove any amount of spend for one media versus another. It allows you to optimize your spending across media, thus avoiding overspending.

The principal solutions out there include MarketShare, Nielsen, Mu Sigma, Think Vine, Analytic Partners, …

Media Management Systems

Also called Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP) solutions, almost every publisher and ad agency has such a solution in which they input all campaign parameters to issue to match insertion orders and contracts. They connect to adserving and SFA systems as well as integrated marketing management solutions. They also connect to accounting ensuring proper financial reporting and discrepancy management. Some even handle the entire RFP process.

The principal solutions here are: MediaOcean (previously known as DDS or Donavan Data Systems and MediaBank), Telmar, Centro Media Manager, Operative, TraffIQ, Theorem, DSM (DART Sales Manager), Steelwedge, AdPro (specialized in out of home), WideOrbit (specialized in broadcast tv and radio)…

Next week…

Next week we will explore the various types of ad tech digital media sellers need to know about.

To know more about digital media sales, I teach a two-day Digital Media Sales course independently. It is a complete preparation before taking the Digital Media Sales Certification exam through IAB (US) which IAB Canada fully endorses. All the material is reviewed annually.

Contact me to set up training with your organization, be it in English or French, national, regional, or local – I will adapt for your organization’s needs.

Authored by Samuel Parent.

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