A Call for More Niche Technology Providers

Marketers are finally starting to realize that working with best-of-breed, niche technology providers rather than ‘all-in-one’ solutions is overall more beneficial for brands. According to the latest Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2017, almost half of marketers (48%) have built best-of-breed marketing technology stacks made up of multipoint solutions, while only 21% use a single-vendor for everything they need. Those 21% are losing out on the potential ROI that specialized companies can provide for them. With the market flooding consumers with 10,000 messages a day, brands need to work with vendors with mastery over specific targeting and messaging strategies to break through the noise and provide them the best ROI.

At Blis, we are focused on putting location data to work for marketers so they can reach their consumers at the optimal time and place and in the right context. We strongly believe that location is the key to finding success across industry verticals whether it be retail, auto, CPG, etc. In the United States, we have had major successes with shopper marketing campaigns. We have been laser focused on refining this solution for our clients. Our technology combines location and movement data with past purchase information and sales uplift figures through partners allowing brands to understand how and where consumers are spending their time and money. With this holy grail of information, they can then create very personalized campaigns that add value to potential customers and drive spend.

For instance, GE Lighting worked with Blis to target GE Lighting shoppers driving them to purchase where GE Lighting products were available. By leveraging our best in class location data, app ownership and purchase data to identify GE Lighting’s target audiences and drive them to select major retailers, the campaign saw a 25% engagement rate with the mobile interstitial ad, exceeding the benchmark by 5% as well as a 29% footfall uplift when targeting users in proximity.

All of this is to say that working with a single generalized vendor has fewer benefits: there is better workflow between the variety of marketing tools and all of your support is in one place making marketing for a more seamless implementation process. The increase of acquisitions in the space show that generalized vendors can get there and are working to do so. Purchasing specialized companies is a great avenue for big vendors to reach this goals such as LiveRamp’s move into B2B data with purchase of Pacific Data Partners in February or Adobe’s 2016 acquisition of TubeMogul.

However, these brands lose out on industry specialization–such as shopper marketing, location insights, and cost. Additionally, using a single vendor means the brand is solely relying on a single company to do everything well when the vendor is likely a jack of all trades but a master of maybe one or two. You wouldn’t want a non-data first company helping your marketing team understand how their target consumers behave as shoppers, right?

Overall, we need more niche technology service providers who master a specific channel or technology like Blis. Marketing technology should be a stack solution with specific strategies for different companies and different verticals to service brands to the best of advertising technology’s current capabilities.

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