Donna Hamilton, VP of audience targeting at Alliant, a marketing data company, discusses the company’s recent Lotame integration and the future of digital targeting.
Direct Marketing News (DMN): Alliant recently integrated its Online Audiences product with Lotame’s data management platform. Can you talk a little bit about why you made this move?
Diane Hamilton (Alliant): We are just about to announce an integration with Exelate tomorrow. Those are the two partners we’ve chosen to use to on-board our database. This process enables us to offer rich transactional information in the online stream for display ad targeting.
DMN: How has targeting evolved in the past five years? In what ways will it evolve in the near future?
Hamilton: It becomes more and more relevant as marketers expand their touchpoints with their customer base to be more effective. There are so many different ways to reach consumers it behooves marketers to use optimization tools across all of the touchpoints. With the technology that is now available, it becomes more possible to track results from initial response to conversion and ultimately to lifetime value. The more we can track that the better use we’ll have of different channels.
DMN: So much customer intelligence data is coming from digital channels. Are there any digital frontiers left for marketers to conquer? What are they?
Hamilton: There’s a lot to be discovered when it comes to optimizing display. There’s still ground to cover in how effective people are using display in tandem with email or direct mail and how you synch all channels together in the best way.
DMN: If you had to choose the three most important data points for b-to-c marketers, what would they be? Why?
Hamilton: The landscape is full of demographics data, inferred data, modeled information, surveys. But our data is true transactional information. [We offer] purchase information as well as payment information. Many of our programs are subscription offers. So when someone places an order they can continue to be in a program and we can see if they pay and stay in a program, if they cancelled, and we’re able to differentiate performance characteristics.
