If there’s one thing that’s characterized the digital marketing universe, it’s fragmentation. Marketers use one tool/platform to implement one campaign element, another tool to implement a second, and never the twain shall meet — not in trafficking, and certainly not in reporting. And, of course, there are usually many more than two elements.
This Achilles’ heel is starting to pain marketers more than ever now, as their target audiences are engaging with messages on a multitude of devices and expecting consistency.
“It’s hard to reach the right audience at the right moment with the right message when every channel requires its own system and you’re patching together, and switching, between ad platforms that aren’t in sync,” said Google’s VP of Display Advertising Neal Mohan in a blog post.
DoubleClick Says Integration Is Coming
Google’s DoubleClick, one of the leaders in the marketing technology space, told partners at its DoubleClick Insights event today that it plans to address this problem by developing a single dashboard — dubbed DoubleClick Digital Marketer — that covers all of its various tools. Additionally, the products will work together better, so marketers can deploy a cross-media campaign that flows.
Here’s Mohan talking at the conference:
The company’s tools include ad server DART for Advertisers, now to be called Digital Marketing Manager, as well as the Invite Media demand-side platform, now rebuilt as DoubleClick Bid Manager. Additionally, DoubleClick Search and DoubleClick Studio — the company’s rich media creation tool — as well as Google Analytics, will be integrated into the new view.
A Crowded Field Of Competitors
The company’s not alone in making investments in, and working to integrate, its technology products. Adobe is certainly in the game, with its Digital Marketing Suite, and Salesforce just declared its intent to play in social by acquiring Buddy Media. Meanwhile, countless other players, both large and small, jockey for a piece of the pie with their own use-case-specific tools.
The planned changes to DoubleClick’s products won’t be coming immediately. “It’s not about a big bang, it’s rolling thunder,” a Google spokesperson told me. “The pieces of this are coming over the coming months.”
Given the fact that no one is actually using these tools yet, it’s hard to judge whether the integration will be successful, but the company insists it’s responding to advertiser requests with these product shifts. DoubleClick surveyed 300 of its clients and found that their team members are spending almost two days a week integrating functions across various digital platforms, often performing manual workflow tasks.
“This is our answer to that challenge from our partners,” the spokesperson said. “This is a hugely complicated project. It’s the first visible milestone and it represents years of work. We wanted to present this to our partners and explain the vision and where this is all going, rather than rolling it out piecemeal.”
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