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Amritan Singh Walia

Consult Analyst

About this Author

Amritan is an analyst in the Consult team. After graduating with a degree in Economics and Finance, Amritan worked with Hewlett Packard as an Operations and Business Analyst and joined iProspect in 2017. Using his experience to elicit and document requirements, Amritan has worked across a number of verticals supporting clients as they navigate the digital economy.

The Power of IoT: Transform Your Digital Marketing Agility

From enhancing our homes to improving our shopping experiences, the Internet of Things affects our daily lives. According to IHS Markit, there are around 20 billion IoT devices across the globe and this is likely to rise to 50 billion by 2020. Information is flowing even more quickly and the ability to adapt and be agile within digital marketing will be crucial for businesses to remain competitive. The journey to “convenience” In retail, convenience and personalisation are the king and queen when it comes to consumer experience. Brands have already found that IoT is an enabling technology to deliver both of these at scale: Juniper Research expect $2.5bn to be spent on retail IoT investments by 2020 worldwide. Amazon announced last year that they will roll out a 'no checkout line store' called Amazon Go. The technology used will consist of smart shelves that are aware of stock levels, beacons that detect store movement as well as image analysis. The store is said to use “sensor fusion” that congregates disparate data sources to improve the accuracy of recognising products. The invisible payment aspect relies on smart devices to identify products and individuals in order to charge their Amazon accounts. Whilst not yet a reality, I believe that more retailers will look to implement similar systems which will have an impact on affiliates marketing as well as how brands look at partnering with retailers to create in-store brand experiences. Amazon Go may be at the forefront of retail innovation however the humble barcode scanner (the precursor to IoT experiences) is still the most widely adopted tool by retailers. Integrations between scanners and smart home appliances will become more commonplace. Amazon are already using Amazon’s Dash Wand integration with Alexa, which provides some A.I. features to make the shopping experience less of a chore. The integration of Dash and Alexa will improve brand stickiness and increase take up of subscription services by enabling customers to conveniently order items without leaving their homes. However, the convergence of this technology is providing a unique challenge to advertisers. For example, a study conducted by Syniverse Research revealed that 75% of consumers do not think that their data is safe with advertisers. Finding the balance of respecting customers' privacy yet adding meaningful personalisation is key to shaping the future of personalisation in IoT. Voice search is also growing. It is thought that 50% of all searches will be image or voice based by 2020. Digital advertisers will need to cater for the wide array of devices with many of these not having a physical display. Current and future challenges: a call to the market leaders Currently IoT technologies feed into their own silo data platforms allowing the manufacturers of these devices to gather the information, interpret and react to their users. Yet significant challenges need to be overcome to connect the individual devices. The goal being to find an overarching platform to anonymously recognise behavioural outputs and store these in a meaningful way. DMPs seem to be a natural fit to perform this function due to their native connections with other platforms. So, what does this mean for your marketing budgets? The potential of IoT in marketing is yet to be realised. The challenges of breaking the silos and finding the value of connections will be greatly beneficial to all stakeholders involved. IoT can formulate bigger transformation projects, but is currently over looked in favour of smaller marketing automation use cases. Budgets in 2018 should reflect both internal and external investment into IoT. 0 3 min read

What You Need to Know About Blockchain and Marketing

Data and customer management solutions have dominated the MarTech industry for several years however we are now seeing them mature and realise full potential. Our dedicated Consult team is at the forefront of innovation and understand how greenfield technologies influence the marketing ecosystem. The last few years have witnessed the extreme hype of cryptocurrencies and their continuous boom (and bust), but a more intriguing debate has developed around the use of the technology that underpins these cryptocurrencies: Blockchain. In simple terms, Blockchain can be described as a giant Excel spreadsheet. Any transaction is added as a “Block” to the spreadsheet which acts as a record keeping ledger. For the marketing industry, IAB have recently suggested that Blockchain could be a perfect fit to solve some of the long standing issues around transparency, fraud, view ability and inefficiencies. In this post, we will cover some of the potential use cases, opportunities and challenges facing the technology. Uses in Marketing Smart Contracts were first implemented into the Ethereum cryptocurrency. These Smart Contracts are actioned once certain conditions are met and make them an interesting proposition for marketing technology. There are several companies already pioneering the Blockchain for programmatic buying. An example of this is the Papyrus platform which is in pilot phase. The platform aims to build on the Ethereum environment to utilise smart contracts for Real-time-bidding (RTB). Due to the structure and transparency of the platform, it discourages fraud as each transaction is cross verified and any unfair play will be recognised. Due to the decentralised nature, it removes the need for third party intermediaries. The market is currently dominated by Facebook and Google who account for around 63% in ad revenues in the US alone. As transactions are conducted directly with the publishers, it eliminates the need for middlemen in the chain and therefore, will reduce the cost of the ads that are presented to the user. Challenges Blockchain can provide valuable solutions to the current inefficiencies in Mar/AdTech however it is not without its challenges. One of the major inefficiencies is the time it takes for transactions to be completed and added to the “Block”. it takes at least 10 seconds for a transaction to be validated with some taking over a minute. Bitcoins longest transaction was around 1.5 hours. Each handoff in the marketing ecosystem will need to be verified therefore adding to the latency. Each part of the marketing supply chain must adopt the technology. Without this, it will lead to capacity issues and gaps within the supply chain. Currently, there is a lack of education, understanding and standardisation in the industry. A potential solution is the use of permissioned or private Blockchains. Private ledgers have been investigated for their uses by major banks. These private ledgers can only be used by one organisation whilst permissioned can be used by a consortium of companies or an industry. The obvious advantage is the speed of the connected Nodes (users) which brings the time it takes to confirm an addition to the Block closer to real time. This could solve RTB predicament for programmatic. Permissioned ledgers may hold great value for restricted industries like alcohol or tobacco where there is a duty to advertise to a certain criteria of people. Having a concise and trusted audit trail, it would be a great advantage to know who exactly the advertising is going to. Conclusion We are seeing clients allocate budget to Blockchain and helping them understand where it could sit within their business. The technology must overcome challenges related to capacity and transactions speed to truly scale. Furthermore, the potential for Blockchain will only be realised once the major players (Google & Facebook) introduce it into their products at which point digital marketing will change as we know it. 0 4 min read

Amritan Singh Walia

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