Dealing with Fragmentation

How can we simplify the marketing landscape?

A breakfast conversation at the Adobe Summit got around to discussing what common concepts, semantics if you will, sit on top of a highly fragmented {digital} marketing environment. 

Here's a snapshot of my take-a-way from the discussion.

First, I need to put some scope around what it is we're trying to describe and architect.   One role of marketing is to "inject interesting content into the consumer journey in order to facilitate choice."   This is broad enough to have a lot of moving parts - touch points, media types, channels, devices, content archetypes, outcomes, etc. It is also focused on marketing communication or 'getting the word out' with an execution point of view.

Some food for thought:

• Campaigns: a vessel for managing budgets designed to achieve temporal objectives. This provides structure and eliminates the 'could do' and 'should' do from the approved 'will do.'
• Audience: a group of people with common needs or characteristics, a common way to access them, and a likely common reaction.  This can be broad for branding, awareness efforts, targeted to a behavioral segment, or focused on a personalized experience as in 1:1 CRM.
• Content: a delivered container of information assembled from assets for the purpose of eliciting a response.   This may be predefined as in flyers, or email or dynamic as in websites and display ads.   Content can be rolled up into packets for cross-channel delivery.
• Context: the circumstances surrounding the interaction.  This ranges from location to ambient environment to previous actions to preferences; all are required in order to improve relevancy.
• Response: the outcome that forms the basis for assessing success. It is often rooted in the metrics and data that can be captured rather than those we need to capture.

The implementation, or resolution, of these concepts becomes a tactical exercise.  And it is the application of business rules and/or judgement that weaves all the parts together to create unique experiences.

Imagine what we could do if all the functions used and shared the same concepts.