Published on the 12/03/2015 | Written by Beverley Head

Successful marketing in the 21st century requires a fresh approach linking data, mobile platforms and creative but valuable-to-the-consumer campaigns…

Delegates attending AdTech in Sydney this week were treated to an update of the latest tools and technologies which are revolutionising the relationship between big brands and consumers.

In the opening keynote address, Pete Mitchell, global media innovations director for confectionary, food and beverage conglomerate Mondelez, outlined the challenge for marketers in terms of taking a more innovative approach in an era where consumer expectations were rising, and there was a limited supply of digitally savvy marketing personnel.

In a bid to become more “intrapreneurial” – and meet its budget plans that 10 percent of sales will be prompted by mobile campaigns this year – Mondelez has run its Mobile Futures campaign twice in Australia already. This seeks pitches from start-ups about how they might create innovative marketing campaigns.

The winners get $40,000 to work with Mondelez employees and come up with pilot programmes in just 90 days. One of the first pilots involved using iBeacons to interact with shoppers in Coles stores, said Mitchell.

“It’s fascinating how that has changed the culture of people. Rather than think about how to work with start-ups, it’s about how to bring that culture into what we are doing,” said Mitchell.

So far Australian start-ups Skyfii, MyShout, Proximiti, Issue and Snaploader have worked in pilot campaigns with Mondelez brands including Cadburys, Favourites and Philadelphia.

Besides the impact that ubiquitous broadband mobile access is having on marketing, Mitchell stressed the importance of access to broad swathes of data which could be used to create highly targetted campaigns.
But he acknowledged that even a business as large as Mondelez was ill-equipped to deal with the rising tide of data.

“Eight billion products are sold each month by Mondelez – in the future we will have some form of data capture and IP enablement (around those sales) – we are not even ready to think about that.”

But Mitchell said that the additional data would provide previously unthinkable insights about how products were being bought and consumed, which could feed into the marketing loop.

While Mondelez might feel unprepared for the data onslaught, it’s meat and potatoes to Oracle which has established its Marketing Cloud business unit to offer a service for marketers so that they can have one stop access to all the data they need to inform marketing campaigns.

Mark Friedler, senior director for Oracle Marketing Cloud said that today “marketing is creativity plus content brought together with data”. He described data as marketing’s “connective tissue”.

But he acknowledged the challenge marketers face with data, saying that studies had showed 82 percent of marketers currently had no access to synchronised data, often because of data being stored in silos across the enterprise.

Steve Baird, manager, marketing and analytics for Virgin Australia is one of the early local users of the Oracle Marketing Cloud which can store all of marketing’s data along with consumer interaction information from multiple sources.

Baird said that the system had been used to provide data for an automated marketing campaign encouraging people to sign up for, and progress through the different levels of Virgin’s loyalty programme. While it had taken six months to get the system up and running, define business rules, data definitions and naming conventions it was now bearing fruit.

He said that using the automated campaign had delivered a click through rate 75 percent higher than the manual campaign while the conversion rate soared 280 percent.