Marketing Communications Today Blog

Phone reps are no longer the front line of customer service. Customers now reach out to their suppliers first through digital channels. In turn, companies worldwide view their call centers not only as a cost center but also a revenue opportunity. AI across the customer lifecycle is driving innovation in prediction, conversation and analytics, backed by a combination of cognitive engines and human assistance.

Listen to our conversation with one of the leaders in what is being called AI-driven conversational engagement. Seb Reeve, EMEA Director of Strategy & Business Development at Nuance, is responsible for defining and evangelizing the Nuance customer care proposition worldwide – sharing how companies can create extraordinary automated experiences.

If you are skeptical about the importance of this trend, consider that Microsoft is about to acquired Nuance for an estimated $19 billion, the 2nd largest acquisition in Microsoft history. Join us to learn about what’s new in customer engagement, and where it’s headed.

A well-placed news story can add significant value to our clients’ communications and marketing efforts.

I know because it’s my job to make sure our content development, key messages, and placement of earned media fits into our overall campaign strategy yet delivers significant value on its own merit.

We have some impressive clients doing important work, and it is a vital aspect of their ultimate success to share their stories and track the results, which can be amplified on social media and leveraged in advocacy. Recently we have participated in compelling announcements at the national, regional, and local levels.

The tools needed to manage your customer data have changed dramatically since the days of “database marketing” in the 1980s. The latest iteration is a CDP, or customer data platform, the subject of our stimulating discussion with David Raab, a leading expert and founder of the CDP Institute. He explains how the tech landscape has become quite complex and continues to morph. The number of systems continues to grow, fed by a proliferation of channels, declining development costs, and easily available funding. Listen in to understand the customer data landscape, why it’s critical to marketing success, and where the technology is going in the future.

Ruth Stevens: What is a customer data platform, and why do I, as a marketer, need one?

David Raab: The official CDP institute definition is that a customer data platform is packaged software that builds a unified persistent customer database that's accessible to other systems. You can buy this thing off the shelf, which means it's faster and cheaper and more likely to work. Unified persistent customer database brings together data from all sources. It stores that data someplace so that you don't lose it if it gets dropped from a source system somewhere. It's a customer database so it's organized around the customer and not around products or about web pages or around retail stores. It’s organized to make it easy to pull together all the data about a single customer. It is designed to share that data so that every system in the company that you need unified customer data has one place to look which saves some effort because everybody is working off the same data so it's consistent. Most companies today have customer data that's stored in a bunch of different systems. When people ask how do I know if I need a CDP, you need a CDP if you find yourself saying you know there's this data in this system that I really need in that system but I can't get to it. There are retail purchases from my point of sale system and my physical store that I'd really like to share with my website so that I can do retargeting on the website based on what people did in the retail store. Or there's a customer history that's captured on the website that I'd really like to share with my call center agents so they can see what people have been doing on the web when they're talking to them. Anything that involves that kind of data sharing, if it's not something you can already do, that's a gap and that's the gap that the CDP is going to fill.

Each semester the WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group of individuals into the MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the worlds most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective to the program.

Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications Network in the fall semester:

What are your interests outside of marketing?

Each semester the WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group of individuals into the MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the world’s most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective to the program.

Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications Network in the fall semester:

What are your interests outside of marketing?

Each semester the WVU Marketing Communications online programs is excited to welcome a new group of individuals into the MCNetwork. The WVU Marketing Communications graduate student population consistently varies in their levels of experience and expertise, with some just completing their undergraduate studies to those holding senior-leadership positions at the world’s most elite agencies and brands. Each students brings unique style and perspective to the program.

Meet some of the students who will be joining the WVU Marketing Communications Network in the fall semester:

What are your interests outside of marketing?

The role of the PR professional is changing fast. No longer limited to media relations or crisis management, these days PR people have evolved into larger and more strategic roles as “communicators,” who handle multi-channel messaging to a variety of important audiences, or “publics.” Our guest, Bonnie Harris, explains what’s driving this change, and where it’s likely to go next.

Ruth Stevens: What is a communications professional and how is that different from marketer or a marketing communications professional?

Bonnie Harris: Communications is a subset of marketing, but I also think that public relations in that title over the years has become really synonymous with media relations and getting news stories. We've seen a trend in the last two or three years where people really are calling it communications once again, which is a smart thing to do because it goes back to the basics of what that job entails from the very beginning.

Bot-generated fraud on digital advertising will waste $42 billion by 2022, according to Jupiter Research. A shocking sum. Our guest, Dr. Augustine Fou, explains why and how ad fraud is perpetrated, and what can be done about it. Listen in to learn how we marketers must change our thinking about ad metrics, and update our media buying strategies altogether.

Cyndi Greenglass: In the last 10 years, we have moved from human-to-human ad networks to programmatic ad networks. This created the opportunity for ad fraud. Marketers have been focused on spending all the money we're given for digital media, and we're relying heavily on vanity metrics so we're exacerbating the problem with that fraud. Did I explain the core situation here for our listeners?

Dr. Fou: Yes, that's a really great way to summarize it in a nutshell. I've been observing this industry for many years, and in the early days of digital advertising, the advertisers—the buyers of the ad—would go to real publishers. But in the last 10 years, the buyers no longer have to go to the publishers to buy the ads because the idea is that they can now place their ads across millions upon millions of sites by buying through an exchange very much like Wall Street. Wall Street connects the buyers and sellers of shares of stock, and the programmatic ad exchanges now connect the buyers and sellers of ad impressions. When you disassociate the buyer from the seller, you now have the possibility of hundreds of thousands of fake sites.

The marketing world has embraced loyalty programs ever since the launch of the American Airlines Advantage program in 1981. But these transactional rewards programs are headed for the trash heap, says our guest Ajay Row, a longtime authority on retention and loyalty, based in Mumbai. Join us to learn the strategy behind loyalty marketing programs and the strategy that is likely to replace them. The key lies in figuring out who’s valuable to you, what’s valuable to them, and how you can deliver and extract more value in the relationship.

Cyndi Greenglass: How would you differentiate loyalty from retention and customer relationship management?

Ajay: So, let's start with customer relationship management. That's really the ground zero, if you will, for what we're going to talk about today and loyalty programs are just way of delivering CRM. Retention is one of the outcomes of a good loyalty program. So, let's take it step by step, first CRM. I think it really boils down to three questions, who is valuable to me, what's valuable to him or her and how do I deliver consistently over time. Let's talk about life, I mean this is pretty much how life works, isn't it? Every business works this way, every human being works this way, you try and figure out who matters to you, then try and figure out what matters to them and then you try to ensure they have a long-term series of interactions called a relationship. Let's start with that as ground zero and start building on that. I'm going to use the example of dating, boy says hey, you know, I’d love to take you out for a meal and girl says yeah that's great. He chooses an Italian place, and she hates Italian food, she loves Asian food. Scenario two, he asks what kind of food do you like and she says I love Asian food and the coordination of a restaurant, same boy, same girl, same date but completely different results. You’re setting yourself up for success by underpinning what we do with data. We use data points so we know who's valuable to us, and you've got a data point used in order to start a relationship on a positive for it. Now, as you keep building that relationship, keep adding data points so you can deliver value consistently and therefore extract it consistently.

The WVU EcoCAR team recently won 3rd place Overall, 1st place for Best Communications Presentation, 1st place Overall Communications Program, 1st place for Best Drive Cycle, and 1st place for Collaboration for Year 3 of the EcoCAR Mobility Challenge (EMC). EMC is a multi-year Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTCs) that is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, and General Motors. It challenges 11 universities across North America to transform a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer into an energy efficient, hybrid-electric vehicle with autonomous capabilities through adaptive cruise control features.

Since the inception of AVTCs in 1988, West Virginia University has participated in 9 out of the 12 competitions. The competition provides valuable hands-on experience for students to learn in-depth about the automotive industry through engineering, business, and communications fields.

I’m the current Communications Manager for the team, which encompasses a variety of roles. I work on all communication related deliverables for the competition as a well as managing social media accounts, coordinating outreach events, and any design elements the team may need. Working for this team has allowed me to push myself and grow as a communicator.