Marketing Communications Today Blog

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.