Big Data, web devices, and IOT marketing has come a long way since the very first banner ad appeared almost 21 years ago. Marketers today have an increasing amount of data on their customers that they are unable to manage. Ads are served up by software systems targeting mobile devices, TVs, sensors, and even the dashboard of your car. Any connected device is an addressable medium to deliver, down to a specific user, a specific message that can also track consumer responses. As marketers and advertisers who are being asked to understand consumer data at a deeper level in order to predict consumer responses to messaging, these devices have created data quantities that have also created a new level of accountability that did not exist before. In this era of marketing accountability, marketing and advertising budgets are turned into quantifiable marketing investments expecting a measurable return.

Let’s take a step back — with the rise of ad-tech, or advertising technology, pioneers like Double Click began a technology race that has seen the buying and selling of digital advertising evolve at an incredible pace. For advertisers, this proliferation has been good and bad. On a good note, brands today have an amazing array of options to reach specific sets of consumer psychographics and quickly test different messages for advertising efficacy. On the negative side, advertisers now have to manage thousands of channels and segments, all while displaying a deep understanding of their data and requiring massive computing and analytics. This staggering effort is causing huge gaps in advertising efficiencies. Thus new methods are now required and advertising automation is quickly leading the way in an otherwise impossible problem.

The world’s digital advertising markets are already making available 100 billion impressions each day. Every one of these impressions is qualified by as many as 100+ variables including pages on site, device types, region, time on site, dimensions of ad unit, etc… In addition, every one of these variables may have up to 100 different values attached including time of day, local weather, personal sentiment, and so forth.

If you try to calculate whether to buy specific ads and what to bid for them, you would need to calculate the number of permutations bidders on ad exchanges ad considers. The answer: 1,000,000,000,000,000; that is a quadrillion — a million billion possibilities. How is it possible to think through this complexity without a machine?

Digital advertising accounts for one in four ad dollars spent. Since digital markets operate in real-time, advertisers with a clear understanding (in real-time) of how consumers are reacting to their data can quickly optimize and re-optimize a message (or channel) for an efficient ad campaign that wastes little time and money. Consider that today’s ad exchanges enable real-time bidding (RTB) on inventory that is bought and sold in 100 milliseconds per transaction. Wouldn’t a deep understanding of your real-time data leading to just-in-time reactions for ad purchases greatly impact your return on the investment? This is why 20% of digital advertising has already embraced programmatic data in order to serve ads to users.

Today, programmatic ad buying has been used for targeting mobile devices, connected displays, and even print. This kind of advertising automation is becoming more mainstream and the faster we embrace it; the better of our organization will be in the long run. Interestingly enough, we’re also seeing similar patterns emerge for marketers. In Factivate, we’re beginning to see a comprehensive array of marketing-related functions within the Factivate spreadsheets that have been transformed by the user’s techniques in order to deliver up to one-third improvement on cost per action. Since Factivate enables the real-time automation of data analysis, data reporting, and data reactions, our marketing technologists are quickly taking advantage of programmable big data in a way that was not possible before.

Programmable and understandable data used in Factivate now makes it possible for a marketing executive to manage the return on marketing investment (ROMI) with a new level of rigor. Rather than set advertising budgets on monthly or quarterly cycles, Factivate’s users are able to launch ad initiatives, and even automatically shift budgets from current campaigns, whenever an opportunity presents itself. The ability to customize data reactions thereafter optimizes all opportunities for efficiency and effectiveness (within nanoseconds); enabling our users to enhance media placement and creative execution (for example, what image goes with what copy in what website) in real time. With this notion, agile marketing takes over and the notion of a “marketing cycle” can soon be out of date.

Once this happens, CMOs and CFOs will be able to communicate and work together like never before. Factivate’s cloud-based platform will enable marketers and finance offers to couple art and science within the same language; spreadsheets. With Factivate, the power of human creativity married with the split second precision is providing CFOs, marketers, and advertisers with a great profit potential. My guess is that anyone who will compete against these Factivate users will quickly find himself out-maneuvered.

About Factivate:

Factivate is a software company part of the Google for Entrepreneurs community in Durham, NC. Factivate provides business users with a cloud-based data analytics platform that can sync with different online tools to create automated, real-time spreadsheet reports and web dashboards with just-in-time business reactions. The result of our intelligent spreadsheet is accurate data analysis that drives better business decisions while reducing manual spreadsheet report time and errors by a factor of 150+ hours/employee/year. Factivate requires no learning curve or programming knowledge. In sharp contrast to the complex and expensive business intelligence tools on the market today, if you know spreadsheets, then you know 95% of what you need to use Factivate–we’ve got the rest covered.