Susan Bidel
Senior Analyst
Author Insights
Blog
Make It Personal And Reap The Profits
This blog post is part of Forrester’s Holiday 2018 retail series. Today’s consumer expects advertisers to deliver personalized, relevant experiences and rewards those that do. Kiran Mani, Google’s managing director of retail, speaking at the National Retail Federation’s September 2018 conference, said that 33% of consumers expect personalized recommendations.[i] Retailers intent on delivering such recommendations […]
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Creative Adtech: The Most Important Category You’ve Never Heard Of (Plus, A Forrester Wave™)
For the past 30-plus years, and for a host of reasons, the age-old connection between creative and media has been severed. In the programmatic era, the focus has been dominantly on media, as though creative didn’t contribute to enticing consumer attention and engagement and driving media performance. The results have been dismal: The digital advertising […]
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Take Your Advertising From Zero To Hero
Today’s marketers are distracted by new technology and more data promising more efficient and personalized advertising. So they forget that adtech — in a vacuum — is no match for how people today consume media, interact with advertising, or think about their experiences with brands. In fact, we know that consumers’ opinions vary widely about how they […]
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Google’s Interpretation Of GDPR Puts Publishers In An Untenable Position: Forrester Recommends Rebellion
The GDPR (or General Data Protection Regulation), Europe’s new data privacy regulation, applies to all organizations — including publishers — doing business with residents of the EU and takes effect on May 25. To learn more about the regulation, please have a look at this post or listen to our May 2017 podcast, “Countdown To […]
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Everything That’s Old Is New Again
GDPR, the new data privacy regulations applicable to all marketers doing business with citizens of the European Union, will take effect later this month, on May 25, 2018. In preparation, Google is changing its terms of service for advertising partners. On April 27, the company let its European platform customers know that, as of that […]
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Predictions 2018: Who Will Win And Who Will Lose Across The Media Landscape
Media, so vital to the wellbeing of the economy, has endured a turbulent year. Marketers questioned the quality of the supply chain. Agencies reorganized to reinforce their value proposition. Ad tech continued to consolidate. Publishers scrambled to make money and keep their two sets of customers – consumers and advertisers – happy. While that short […]
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And the Duopoly Strikes Again
The acquisition of Rocket Fuel by Sizmek is not so much an example of ad tech consolidation as it is one of the power of the Facebook/Google duopoly to quash competitors, this time on the buy side. Now, it’s not as though Rocket Fuel didn’t make mistakes. To start with, they are part of an […]
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In the Age of the Customer, Data Is King
Successful companies have always been customer obsessed. How to get them, how to keep them, how to make them advocates are all questions that have kept CEOs awake at night since commerce began. Today’s sophisticated data management platforms offer marketers the digital tools to aggregate and mine their data to answer those questions. The core […]
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Marketers Aren’t Getting What They’re Paying For
Marketers have always carefully calibrated their messages and the audiences they wanted to reach, and, for most of advertising’s history, the process was pretty straightforward. Marketers used content as a proxy for audience, and worked with known and trusted entities to carry out their plans. They bought space, delivered materials to publishers, and ads appeared. […]
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Fake News Challenges Brands’ Equity
Brand equity is a precious thing. It takes years to build and can be damaged in a heartbeat by unforeseen events, like product breakdown, and ill-considered marketing strategy. Smart marketers exercise control over how, where, and when their product or service is seen in order to safeguard their brand investment. The tools and partnerships that […]
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Marketers Take Note: Working With Publishers Produced Better Results
Jeff Bezos is a legendary innovator whose company, Amazon, is driving business transformation across industries. Clearly he’s not shy about challenging the status quo. In 2013 he invested a portion of his personal fortune in The Washington Post, a publisher of repute since 1877. Though many feared he would interfere with the content, he hasn’t […]
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Salesforce Closes their Marketing Cloud Gap with Krux
Posted in collaboration with Richard Joyce and Joe Stanhope, with Melissa Parrish. With 150,000 customers, Salesforce, one of the world’s largest providers of customer relationship management (CRM) technology, is a trusted steward of its clients’ first-party customer and sales data. In acquiring Krux, a data management platform that ranked as a Leader in Forrester’s […]
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What Does Acxiom’s $310M LiveRamp Bid Mean For Marketers
On May 14, Acxiom announced its intention to acquire LiveRamp, a "data onboarding service," to the tune of $310 million in cash. Several Forrester analysts (Fatemeh Khatibloo, Tina Moffett, Sri Sridharan, and I) cover these two firms, and what follows is our collective thinking on the impending acquisition after having been briefed by Acxiom's leadership […]
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Oracle Buys BlueKai To Add Data Capabilities To Its Stack
On February 24, Oracle announced it was buying data management platform BlueKai for an estimated $350 million, to add to its enterprise marketing suite. This acquisition is the latest in a string of big-ticket purchases that Oracle has made recently to further flesh out its marketing offerings. In 2012, it acquired Eloqua, a marketing automation […]
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The Viewability Standard Will Shake Up The Display Ads Industry, But Ultimately Benefit Publishers
Since the day the very first banner ad appeared nineteen years ago, advertisers and publishers have defined a served impression in a multiplicity of ways. Today, advertisers have little confidence that what they are buying is what they are getting, a factor that is contributing to the downward pressure on CPMs for display ads. The […]
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Off To A New Start . . .
After 20-plus years of working in publishing for brands as diverse as Inc., Fortune Small Business, Money, Martha Stewart Living, and the mother of them all, People, I recently joined Forrester as a senior analyst serving Marketing Leadership Professionals, covering monetization strategies and technologies for publishers. Understanding publishers and how they thrive as organizations and […]