Attribution is one of the hot topics in Marketing.
Any Marketch industry event is now filled with the tech helping you to test more, test quicker and test better than your competition. Most of the tech is directed at online sector targeting specifically CMOs and CROs.
CRO’s (Chief Revenue Officers) whose job is to grow the revenues are usually tasked with the A/B testing and attribution. This position evolved from online replacing Head of E-commerce and unlike CMO suggests highly analytical revenue driven role.
As the line between online and real-world blurs companies are desperate to transfer methods and metrics from online into real-world. You can say I am the biggest advocate for looking at online best practices and looking at ways how they can be adopted across the wider marketing field, traditional media included.
Having spent most of my career in online, I learned quickly what metrics mean in the sales cycle and how it ultimately contributed to the exponential growth of the online advertising.
However, It’s not a simple matter of transplanting best A/B practices into real-world. For a start, a binary (0/1) world of online is very different from multidimensional world we live in, work and shop. The number of factors at play is at least one level of magnitude more. How we make a purchase decision in real-world is so much more complex. But test and attribute we must.
The answer here is AI. It has the ability to analyse 100’s of factors such as color, text, format, location, context and even weather conditions. All those factors are then assigned scoring value delivering rich data on what contributed to a conversion.
I am not sure if some of the great tools from online can be adopted to run analytics on traditional media. I would argue that analysing 100’s of factors which govern the Outdoor for an example market requires a platform that understands both the nuances of the real-world and the specifics of a medium. Let’s see how the deep tech industry responds to fill this gap.
