Dispatch from the ad:tech Trenches: Defining 'Omnichannel'

Omnichannel advertising is NOT the same thing as a bunch of point solutions across different media. Yet, it’s often mistaken as such. True omnichannel advertising consists of highly coordinated campaigns across multiple media and platforms, and is designed to deliver a consistent message and experience.

This was one of the first points in today’s workshop on Omnichannel advertising at ad:tech San Francisco, led by Sean Shoffstall, VP Innovation & Strategy, Teradata Interactive.

True omnichannel advertising, therefore, requires the advertiser to have an empirical understanding of the customer, and where he or she is exposed to a given campaign. And — wouldn’t you know it — this understanding requires a huge amount of data. Oh yes, and it helps if the data is real-time (or close to it).

Bottom line: Omnichannel advertising is the ultimate in CUSTOMER-focused analysis. It is NOT about media performance. It’s about customer experience. One can readily see how this requires many systems to tie together at the back-end, in order to assemble an accurate picture of the experience of the individual customer.  Very few brands or national advertisers, let alone SMBs are equipped to do this today.

And… to come full circle, this also explains why a company like Teradata is focusing on the digital advertising industry.

This is one of more and more examples of how Big Data will be leveraged by businesses of all sizes, including SMBs — usually through agencies or other intermediaries. (In fact, I’ll be moderating a panel at BIA/Kelsey SMB in September on this subject.)

Sidebar: Teradata Interactive started life as Ozone Online, a San Francisco digital ad agency that was purchased a year ago by Teradata. Teradata — the huge data storage hardware, data warehousing and analytics provider. So among other things, Teradata is now operating an innovative digital ad agency.

In fact, you can see the entire arc of the IT industry just in the history of the Teradata company. It started as the data division of NCR, the old “big iron” cash register and mainframe company. It was spun out of NCR in 2007 as a standalone data warehousing and analytics company. And with the acquisition of Ozone Online in 2014, it has become a Big Data online services provider. The whole evolutionary path of IT — in a single company.