Why Are So Many MADTech Players Using Catcher’s Mitts to Play First Base?

Why Are So Many MADTech Players Using Catcher’s Mitts to Play First Base?

By William A. Lederer, Chairman and CEO, iSOCRATES

The COVID-19 pandemic has required each of us to adjust and adapt. But adjusting and adapting doesn’t mean we should use the wrong tools for the jobs we do every day.

Just as no baseball player can be expected to field his position with the wrong glove or mitt, marketing and media professionals should not be forced to adapt to business intelligence tools that ill-suited to their needs.

Yet, too many media and marketing stakeholders—buy-side and sell-side, MarTech and AdTech, B2C and B2B—find themselves in just this position. When it comes to mission-critical, decision-support tools that provide media-and-marketing-specific campaign and enterprise-level data, analytics, business intelligence, reporting, and alerts… there is a dearth of affordable, easy-to-use options.

 

Traditional BI Tools Fail Most Media and Marketing Pros

Media and marketing folks have different needs than finance, operations, and HR, for example. You need tools that will properly service each department. For example, marketers may need a vendor that can handle a lot of data sources, track customer behavior, and show the data in different ways. Finance professionals, on the other hand, may work with fewer data sources and need to see the information linearly.

Few BI tools are media and marketing purpose-built, and few of those are built for scale. In some cases, they may be free or inexpensive (Google, Microsoft, Amazon) but not enterprise-grade or scalable. Or, they may be expensive, but inflexible. Typical BI options are good solutions for many businesses, but they don’t solve the specific needs and interests of media and marketing folks.

What media and marketing professionals need is a tool that can handle a wide and deep variety of specific use cases, for example: inventory monetization including yield management, campaign pacing reports and alerts, consolidated omnichannel reporting, comparative activation platform performance, audience and customer analytics, campaign performance benchmarks, and enterprise roll-up analytics and reporting.

Rarely are BI tools usable for different departments and stakeholders in an organization and its partners and affiliates. They may help the catcher, but you need a mitt that’s going to work for first base, third base, and in the outfield, too. Tools like that do exist, but they’re hard to come by.

 

What Media and Marketing Really Needs

Whether you’re in corporate marketing, the agency world, digital publishing, or a related data/technology field, you need pre-built specialized dashboards, scorecards, and relevant alerts to make the best use of your time. Pre-built data integrations are crucial, too. If the tool can’t handle dozens of data sources seamlessly, it’s not going to work in the media and marketing ecosystem.

Similarly, scarcity of time, engineering and analyst resources mandate the need for easy filtering and report building without the need for coding or SQL queries. Too often, traditional BI tools require intensive training, dedicated manpower, specialized, and a good deal of focused time. Increasingly, that’s simply not practical.

In the current landscape, organizations need to be lean and agile; you need a flexible solution that speeds up your ability to understand your business and respond to market trends. When picking a vendor, ask yourself: How flexible is this solution? Is it strong enough to replace what you have? Will it reduce your total ownership costs or raise them?

 

There Is Hope

Fortunately, there is a unified media and marketing data and business intelligence platform that is purpose-built for both MarTech and AdTech to serve both the supply-side and the demand-side of B2C and B2B, including publishers, marketers, agencies, and their enablers.

The platform is cloud-based, available on-demand, and handles four key components: data sources, data consolidation (including ETL and data matching table tools for a consolidated View of a customer and audience), data warehousing, and business intelligence (analytics, visualizations, reports, and alerts).

Plus, the platform has more than 100 pre-built dashboards and scorecards, over 100 data integrations, and is offered on a monthly managed service basis. It’s also white-labelable, skinnable, and supported 24/7/365. Most importantly, it’s been proven successful, with dozens of publishers, marketers, agencies, and enablers using it each and every day.

Learn more about this topic and about iSOCRATES MADTechBI^TM by downloading our free whitepaper: The iSOCRATES Guide to MADTechBI: Evaluating and Selecting MarTech and AdTech Business Intelligence Platforms