Erica DePalma, VP of digital marketing at Media Horizons, a marketing services company, discusses her new role and the potential impact of SOPA and PIPA legislation.
Direct Marketing News (DMN): What are your short- and long-term goals in your new role?
Erica DePalma (Media Horizons): My short-term goals include educating our clients on the importance of a centralized direct response strategy, especially as it relates to digital media when it’s more important than ever to plan and capitalize on earned opportunities. My long-term goal is to work with our clients to help evolve their attribution models for cross-channel marketing. A lot of clients are just starting to think about mobile and social, and our goal is to not only guide their entry into the space but also understand how to accurately measure those mediums in a customer’s path to conversion.
DMN: How will digital evolve over the next few years? What will that do to change how marketers gather customer intelligence?
DePalma: Specific to digital in direct response it’ll evolve through social, mobile and attribution. Clients become very dependent on data to guide their media mix, and new channels like social and mobile that lack the more sophisticated tracking are a disruption in what advertisers have grown to love about digital. We’re taking a step back and educating them on getting back to basics by testing into those spaces, at meaningful levels, and analyzing the “when-in” impact on the bottom line when they are included as part of the media mix.
DMN: With the SOPA and PIPA debate heating up, what concerns should marketers have about potential legislation?
DePalma: What’s important to me is that … we separate and hold at equal importance legislation around data pass and the storage of personally identifiable information, behavioral targeting and this groundswell around consumers’ rights to access and disseminate information online.
DMN: What aspect of mobile marketing should marketers pay most attention to in the New Year? Why?
DePalma: Making sure their sites are mobile friendly and not dismissing the channel because in line item form, it lacks the tracking and targeting that they believe to be the power behind other digital channels.
