More than 150 senior marketing executives gathered to discuss the future of customer-first data, media, and measurement strategies

Measurement challenges in an increasingly-gated media environment, the need to unleash and maximize ‘next-level data,’ and the impact of emerging channels are among the key trends to watch in marketing for the remainder of 2023, according to leading executives who attended TransUnion’s Brave New Worlds 2023 Marketing Transformation Summit.

TransUnion’s annual marketing industry event included more than 150 senior brand, agency, publisher and advertising technology executives. This year’s theme – Connected Consumers are Rewriting the Rules – emphasized the importance of customer-centricity with the recognition that consumer behavior and expectations are changing faster that most marketers can adapt.

Industry luminaries such as Cadillac’s CMO, Melissa Grady Dias; MediaLink’s Chairman and CEO, Michael Kassan; TelevisaUnivision’s President of Advertising Sales and Marketing, Donna Speciale; and Kinesso’s Chief Growth Officer, Crystal Wallace all discussed the seismic shifts impacting omnichannel marketing and consumer behavior, and the steps marketers can take to transform their teams and businesses to prepare for the realities of consumer privacy regulation, data deprecation, and media fragmentation.

“The forces reshaping the media and marketing worlds are more powerful than ever,” said Matt Spiegel, EVP, TruAudience Growth Strategy at TransUnion and Emcee of Brave New Worlds 2023. “Consumers are setting the pace for the industry as their consumption habits evolve. A rapidly shifting regulatory environment is pushing marketers and publishers to adapt their data and identity approaches. And emerging channels require entirely new strategies from the bottom up — from messaging to targeting to measurement.”

The top three trends discussed during the event are distinctively different, but equally important, in how they will impact the marketing industry.

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Trend #1: Measurement challenges in an increasingly-gated media environment

Measurement is crucial to understanding performance and evaluating investment, but it’s only getting harder as the broader media ecosystem becomes more fragmented and more walled gardens spring up. Data is more available but less centralized, presenting a fundamental challenge for cross-channel measurement and attribution.

“Being able to move from planning to measurement and in-market optimization is nirvana, but marketers and agencies need to have access to information,” said Julie Clark, Senior Vice President, Diversified Markets, Media & Entertainment at TransUnion. “The more publishers create their own walled gardens, the less visibility we’ll have, and our measurement results will be at odds with one another.”

Trend #2: Need to unleash and maximize the potential of audiences with next-level data

There needs to be guidance into how marketers can turn a unified consumer data strategy into an engine for growth, while delivering consistent and relevant experiences to people across marketing channels over time. More actionable customer data is crucial to all important marketing use cases today — from insights to personalization, audience segmentation to consumer journey orchestration, all the way to campaign measurement and attribution.

“We don’t have a rich enough understanding of our customers to deliver on what they really care about. This means, for example, investing in a deeper understanding of consumers to demonstrate that brands are listening and adopting messaging strategies that demonstrate a clear value exchange,” said Joanna O’Connell, Research Analyst.

Trend #3: Building an identity strategy should be a core focus

While many are still early in the journey of bringing together enterprise and marketing data, there was consensus among attendees that this approach can form the basis for much more extensive consumer analytics and insights, audience segmentation and enrichment, media planning, buying, activation and measurement. Whether this is done in a Consumer Data Platform (CDP), across the adtech stack, or increasingly within a cloud data warehouse, the principles are the same, and identity is the unifying first principle that guides them all.

“Those further along on the identity journey are already seeing the results of these investments – from increased consumer insights, to more effective media strategies and increased sales and ROAS. I believe that five years from now these identity assets will soon become as much an enterprise asset on the balance sheet, as cash, real-estate and patents,” said Michael Schoen EVP and GM of Marketing Solutions at TransUnion. “We believe that marketers should treat identity as a complement versus identity as an alternative.”

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