Despite continuous evolutions in the marketing ecosystem, advertisers and agencies continue to raise concerns about unlocking organizational value amidst rapid change. Coupled with this is uncertainty around properly measuring marketing success, performance, and the management of customer data. Implementing data standards practices and strategies is key to navigating the growing number of touchpoints and inputs that companies rely on to power marketing and advertising efforts. The bottom line is that data standardization strategies must be administered to achieve true organizational value.

Advertiser Perceptions recently reported that data standards have emerged as a necessity, with 95% of survey respondents agreeing that data standards are essential for ROI and measurement. This is crucial  for privacy-centric progress and suggests that brands and agencies should collaborate to measure marketing success and manage customer data effectively. As a first step, all stakeholders must assess current trends in several key areas: the content supply chain, data standards, organizational roles and responsibilities, and the impact reporting has on measurement.

GenAI and Content Supply Chain Visibility

Advertiser Perceptions found that two in five US advertisers already use generative AI for ad creative, with another one in two considering it. As reliance on GenAI increases, advertisers must prioritize content optimization – via proper tagging and tracking of assets – production processes and brand safety. Otherwise, they risk data inefficiencies, impacting advertising execution and competitiveness.

While AI use is increasing, only 26% of advertisers feel confident in their ability to track AI-generated assets. However, tracking is crucial for measuring ROI, avoiding brand safety issues, ensuring efficient ad targeting, providing transparency, and complying with regulations. Lack of proper metadata tagging and ID-ing of content hinders campaign optimization, leading to wasted ad spend and missed opportunities. Seven in 10 respondents identify properly tagging creative assets for tracking and optimization as their top challenge – unsurprising as manual tagging attempts to keep up with GenAI. This difficulty in tracking creative across channels complicates the accurate measurement of ROI, hindering data-driven decision-making and effective budget allocation. Ultimately, advertisers estimate that one in four ads result in the wrong ad creative being served to the wrong consumer, leading to negative user experiences.

To overcome these hurdles, the industry must invest in advanced tools and technologies for content and creative tagging, tracking, optimization, and attribution, while prioritizing data management and transparency to gain a comprehensive understanding of campaign performance across channels.

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ROI Questions and Ad Agency Involvement

US advertisers have reported an average ROI increase of 33% thanks to the introduction of data standard strategies. However, gaps in agency involvement in data standards practices significantly limit advertisers’ ability to achieve greater ROI, ensure privacy compliance, and maintain brand safety.

The increasing number of platforms and decreasing signals have made demonstrating ROI and ROAS a growing challenge for 79% of US advertisers. This difficulty has heightened job insecurity, with 84% of agencies and 71% of marketers expressing fear of job loss due to an inability to prove impactful results.

Implementing a shared taxonomy and providing agencies with proper data access can significantly improve data transfer accuracy and directly link performance to campaigns and their creative assets. This enhanced visibility and control are necessary, considering that advertisers estimate nearly a quarter of ads are served incorrectly.

By establishing a unified data standards framework, advertisers and agencies can foster a collaborative environment, ensuring alignment and transparency. This not only streamlines campaign optimization but also minimizes the risk of brand safety issues by proactively identifying and resolving potential concerns. Ultimately, data standards empower agencies to make data-driven decisions, enhancing campaign effectiveness while safeguarding brand integrity. Agencies can ensure accurate data transfer and usage by following standards, reducing compliance and brand safety risks.

Reporting Time and Excel Use

Data management challenges persist, as evidenced by the median 2-3 day timeframe for resolving reporting errors and the growing number of individuals (now up to 11) required to address manual data entry mistakes. This underscores the growing complexity and resource demands associated with these tasks.

Currently, agencies are more likely than marketers to combine data in Excel sheets and receive creative asset information via Excel spreadsheets. Relying on Excel alone is not a marketing metadata best practice and presents several challenges. Manual data entry increases the risk of errors and inconsistencies, while collaboration becomes difficult due to version control issues. Integrating data from multiple sources is often time-consuming and prone to errors. Ultimately, using Excel as the primary method for metadata creation and management can negatively impact data accuracy, collaboration, scalability, and overall marketing effectiveness.

Everyone Has A Role

Data standard functions vary across roles due to employee responsibilities and goals, and data access. Key roles in advertising shape the life cycle – strategic roles are optimistic but distant from processes, while operations and analytics face data integration challenges. Distance from specific tasks limits data access, while teams closest to the task understand data strategies best. More specifically:

• Analytics Teams are more likely to strongly understand how audiences are being targeted on all digital formats, but struggle with aggregating and transferring data.
• Strategic Teams are more likely to assume workflows and technologies are incorporated into their data standards practices, but must vet assumptions with teams closest to practices to ensure full awareness of what still requires attention and care.
• Ops Teams would benefit from improved data accessibility and clearer guidance to enhance their data standards strategy implementation. This group struggles with data silos and quickly identifying data in need of attention.

There must be synergy across these groups to understand broader advertising roadmaps, execution of plans with customer data insights, and reporting.

Data standardization is a critical part of modern marketing. It enhances ROI, efficiency, marketing performance, privacy compliance, and data-driven decision-making. Embracing data standardization empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of modern marketing and unlock their full potential.

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