Seems that everyone is moving towards real time. The latest example - Google Instant - highlights how the Internet is moving rapidly towards instantaneous and relevant experiences. Fancy algorithms are sifting through mountains of data measured in zettabytes - a stunning 1 billion terabytes - and delivering real-time results. Being instantly relevant will become the standard by which all other brand experiences will be measured.
Online advertising technologies are moving towards real time as well. Aggregators are enabling marketers to make decisions on an impression by impression basis. Rapid decisions, backed by sophisticated models, give marketers the ability to fine tune their media campaigns in real-time, potentially adjusting bids for specific impressions on the fly based on decisions about the likelihood for the consumer to click.
Continued changes in media consumption explains the real-time phenomenon. There's no denying the move towards increased consumption of digital media (even the venerable New York Times is acknowledging that the days of print are numbered). This seismic shift in consumer behavior has resulted in an explosion of online content - and interactions with this content is producing all sorts of interesting data about consumer behaviors.
This media consumption trend has been occurring for many years, with marketers relying on brand web sites as their primary means of engaging with consumers. But this single-channel interaction construct has come under assault in recent years. For those brands that live entirely online, like Amazon and eBay, shifts in digital interactions using social and mobile channels has made their job of gathering and harnessing data more challenging. What they perfected on their desktop sites - recommendations, personalization, etc. - now needs to be distributed to other places where consumers interact with their brands. And they need to be synchronized to make sure there's consistency in how offers and recommendations are personalized.
Another complexity is the speed at which content is created, consumed and spread. In the age of content curators, where individuals create and add to content that's already been created, conversations about brands come and go with tremendous speed in the Twitter (in excess of 50 million tweets per day) and Facebook ecosystems. Important trends appear and subside quickly. Many trends go undetected.
The result - content that is spreading rapidly, trends that are emerging continuously, ad impressions that are awaiting decisions, social and mobile interactions that are isolated from desktop web sites. A quagmire of data and content. Different systems managing different user experiences. Different databases, each with their own view of the customer. Content management platforms that are rigid and centralized, not keeping pace with the appetites of content curators.
All these deficiencies are amplified for brands who experience seasonal volumes - most notably retailers who place large bets on Holiday shoppers to deliver. A small improvement in November and December can make up for a lackluster year.
Today's technology solutions need to weave all this data and content together - and do so with a speed and agility that real time requires. Fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter should be an "addressable" audience, integrated into campaign management platforms. Conversations about your brand should be constantly monitored and, when relevant trends are detected, tools should immediately spring into action to serve relevant content into the conversation.
To take full advantage of these trends, ad impression decisions should be synched up with insights obtained from the rest of the digital ecosystem. Are specific customer segments that receive SMS and Email offers responding at a higher rate than expected...suggesting that these same offers should be displayed on your Facebook and Twitter accounts, your ad banners and your recommendation engine on your site? Are new conversations about a relevant trend informing how much you bid on certain keywords and/or display banners?
The opportunities with real time decisioning are significant. Technologies that integrate campaign management tools with sophisticated analytics are maturing. Datawarehouse systems are able to sift through increasingly large and complex datasets, often with the help of "in database" analytics and data appliances. Centralized decision engines are able to span multiple channels, synchronizing offers and treatments to deliver integrated messaging strategies. And response data and other behavioral data is able to be quickly incorporated into datamarts, enabling continuous modeling and scoring so that new trends can be exploited.
To be sure, integrating all these technologies is expensive and difficult. The ROI, however, can be significant and positive within a very short period of time. Now that Google has set the bar sufficiently high for real-time results, consumers are going to expect similar experiences from the brands they trust. Otherwise, they'll turn their attention to brands that can deliver on the promise of real time.
