Reaching the right audience throughout the journey to purchase has always been essential for brands. But in a world of shrinking windows of movement data along with shrinking marketing budgets, the ability to truly understand and reach the right audience can make all the difference for staying in business.
That’s why we are excited to partner with Skyrise Intelligence, a next generation media planning solution that harnesses telco-powered data to improve marketing effectiveness. We spoke to Ben Wilkins, Board Director, Skyrise Intelligence about the partnership and how understanding consumer behaviour will help advertisers bridge the gap between planning and activation across all channels, at scale.
Blis: You mention you’re a next generation media planning tool. What does that mean?
Ben Wilkins: We founded Skyrise Intelligence because there was a need to bring audience and media planning tools up to date. The market is dominated by legacy solutions focused on one specific media, based on small sample sizes or with application only for planning, not activation. Most other modern solutions are cookie and ID based and hence under threat from new privacy legislation and upcoming tracking restrictions. At Skyrise Intelligence we harness the power of vast, representative datasets to uncover detailed consumer behaviours that can be activated against in place and time.
Blis: What is the USP of Skyrise? Why should a brand choose you?
BW: Our solution uniquely harnesses the power of telco-powered data to make marketing campaigns more effective. At its core, we create high quality audiences by analysing the digital and real world behaviour of over 20 million adults in the UK. Our datasets are highly deterministic and not reliant on panels or surveys that date very quickly. In fact our data is collected in close to real time so we can analyse what’s happening now and not 3 months ago. This lets us build highly relevant segments that are more likely to drive performance for our advertisers. All of this provides brands with very powerful insight to guide and power their marketing campaigns, enabling them to become more data driven in a future proofed and compliant way.
Blis: Privacy and consent have become more prevalent across all consumer touchpoints. How do you ensure your dataset is robust and compliant?
BW: We follow very strict and robust data privacy processes to ensure that all Skyrise data segments contain no PII, unique identifiers or are at risk of identifying individual consumers. To achieve this we design and build all segments in collaboration with our telco data partners from anonymised mobile network data, rich in profile, attributes, location and digital activity, before aggregating it into the Skyrise data platform for analysis and activation.
Blis: Can you tell us more about how marketers can harness the intelligence and insight Skyrise provides to deliver on the promise of right time/place/person/message marketing in an increasingly fragmented media ecosystem.
BW: We start by building a custom profile of the audience the advertiser wants to reach. We then aggregate those audiences out of the platform to provide strategic audience insight. We analyse how large the audience is, what they look like demographically and what their digital behaviours are. These identified audiences then become activation segments. This insight allows advertisers to plan an omnichannel media plan, by overlaying times, places and environments where the audiences are.
Blis: The main issue for brands over the next couple of years will undoubtedly be around attribution. In this cookieless world, how will brands be able to track their campaigns and what will this do to the digital ad ecosystem?
BW: Brands will certainly have to become less reliant on cookies, that is pretty clear. This will lead them to focus on more holistic marketing and business goals. Data and metrics around how customers interact with a brand online and offline will play a large role in monitoring that.
For some campaigns we’re analysing app usage based on regional variations, and for others we’re analysing against competitor usage. It really is a case-by-case basis depending on the overall goal. We’re finding that post-lockdown there are ‘new-normal’ anomalies that brands need to understand more, and especially how those amonolies are affecting the sector and competitors comparable to their own brand. With our insight and intelligent data, we’re in a unique position to interpret those ‘new-normal’ anomalies, which is really exciting.
Blis: Why are you partnering with Blis as the exclusive location partner?
BW: Location is a huge part of Skyrise Intelligence capabilities. Blis understand location better than anyone and are world leaders in hyperlocal targeting, so are the perfect partner for us. Skyrise Intelligence has the ability to describe and identify very specific audiences across the UK and Blis has the capability to target that audience in very specific locations. That is an immensely powerful combination, arguably unlike anything else in the market. The partnership means our data and insight gives advertisers the opportunity to profile audiences at scale, and then seamlessly activate with the best location partner around.
Blis: How do you think COVID will change ad tech/the media landscape – if at all – once it’s ‘over’?
BW: Recency and understanding up to the minute agile behaviour is going to be key. Data-sets that can draw out granular detail become hugely important when almost everyone is showing comparable behaviour out of necessity rather than choice. Working with ad-tech partners that allow brands to think about recency and activate very agile campaigns will be the ones that succeed.
Blis: How do you prepare for a privacy-centric world as a business leader?
BW: I think every leader needs to be aware of what ‘privacy-centric’ looks like for their individual business. The more forward thinking leadership teams are putting data at the centre of their business strategy now. You only need to look at the rise of DTC brands recently to illustrate that. Not only are these digital-first challenger brands, but more traditional household names. They recognize that owning the customer relationship and harnessing 1st party data gives them a distinct advantage in the long term. Whether it’s enriching a 1st party data strategy or taking the first steps to becoming more data driven, here at Skyrise and with Blis we aim to help brands take meaningful steps on this journey.
To find out how this exciting new offering might work for you get in touch here.
