As AI, IoT, and data privacy regulations continue to evolve, there is tremendous potential for consumer-focused industries to transform the way they interact with customers. In a privacy-first DX 2.0 economy, a brand's success depends on its ability to quickly generate comprehensive 360° customer profiles, analyze data from multiple channels, and deliver dynamic and hyper-personalized experiences in real-time.

But there are challenges.

Unfortunately, many brands rely on legacy technologies that are ill-equipped to adapt in an agile way—facing siloed data, stale customer insights, growing privacy regulations, and the decline of third-party cookies. Without the ability to unify customer insights across all channels in real-time, companies who heavily rely on analytics will struggle: they may see a decline in retention and ROI, and an increase in churn.

In this blog, we’ll explore five critical keys to success that sports entertainment and ad tech brands need to succeed in the DX 2.0 economy—and how customer intelligence can enable and amplify that success.

Media & Ad Tech DX 2.0 Checklist

Leveraging and activating customer data is your bread and butter. You can’t do that without a few core functions and capabilities that should already be set in place. 

If you don’t have all of the following, your brand will run into big hurdles:

• Predictive Customer Journey Analytics at Scale

Consider the sports fan placing bets while watching a game in real-time. They may open your app to place bets, check game outcomes, read live updates, or click on an ad at a certain time—all while watching a game on their streaming device. They may even comment within your app as a game unfolds, or as another ends. Each of these events contextualizes the customer’s larger journey, and your brand’s ability to predict their future behavior is crucial to providing better experiences and upsell opportunities.

A problem, though, is scaling that data upon ingest. DX 2.0 customer journeys are a massive tapestry of countless user events interwoven across multiple channels, so brands need an analytics solution that can scale. Many sports media companies rely on a multitude of tools to pull insights, collect data, and process that data—which ends up giving brands a fragmented, stale view of their customers. Without a scalable, comprehensive analytics solution, sports media and ad tech companies just won’t be able to meet their customers and leverage their data in real-time.

• Privacy-Centric Real-Time Data Ingestion 

So far, 2023’s market volatility has driven brands to slow down on advertising spending. Global advertising spending growth in 2023 is projected to slow to 3.8%, compared to 19.6% in 2021. As a result, ad tech brands are under immense pressure to maximize ROI. In a cookieless world, brands have to rely on first-party data—and adhere to new privacy regulations and customer trust expectations. 

Ad tech companies need real-time data analysis of first-party data, as data is ingested. Privacy and compliance also need to be implemented upon data ingest. In doing so, companies can perform cross-media measurement faster, with more accuracy, and make changes while a campaign is in-flight. Instead of waiting days or weeks after an ad campaign, brands can glean minute-to-minute insights into user behavior and determine the most effective activation channel.

• Hyper-Personalization
  
  The customer experience remains a driving factor in brand success—and if you can’t give customers the best, they’ll go elsewhere very easily. A Salesforce survey found 88% of customers believe that a brand’s CX is just as important as its product or service–up from 80% in 2020. This is not a challenge, but an opportunity for hyper-personalization—if you have the right solution. Hyper-personalization enables brands to tailor their marketing and ads to individual customers by crafting custom and targeted experiences. Leveraging contextual data across all touchpoints of the customer journey enables you to create more meaningful profiles of your prospects and customers in real-time. But, you need a solution that can ingest data directly across multiple sources and perform customer journey analysis in real-time. 
  

• Optimized Data Science Exploration 
  
  Data-driven brands are data-hungry brands. As digital customer journeys expand and touchpoints multiply, DX 2.0 brands need a scalable, easy-to-use solution to explore data. Giving data science teams (and non-technical teams) the ability to explore data without limits in an expressive and approachable way is the gold standard. If teams can’t easily run queries, iterate on those queries, and pull fast insights, an entire organization loses. Moreover, if running queries is particularly technical and code-heavy, teams like marketing and customer service have to rely on data scientists to run those insights—which delays the process altogether.

4 Ways Customer Intelligence Helps Brands Succeed in the DX 2.0 Economy

Thriving in today’s DX 2.0 economy isn’t easy without the right tools. But failing to do so hinders your ability to provide better ad campaigns and content, execute optimal cross-media measurement, drive ad ROI, and more. 

A customer intelligence solution can change that.

For media and ad tech companies, executing the following functions flawlessly is not only a must, but will deliver the business results they’re looking for. A customer intelligence platform, like Scuba Analytics, can help them do that:

1. 1. Multi-Touch Attribution and Measurement

With fewer third-party cookies and more privacy regulations to adhere to, obtaining accurate attribution is challenging, but all the more essential. Customer intelligence makes that possible, and can help pinpoint where revenue-driving customer touchpoints are happening, which channels they come from, and when. Real-time multi-touch attribution insights empower your team to identify trend lines and deliver hyper-targeted campaigns with confidence. Behavioral journey analysis, customizing experiences, and robust A/B testing are must-haves for brands who want to achieve attribution and measurement properly. 

For example, a sports media company might have multiple digital channels, like its website, smartphone app, and varying social media accounts. Customer behavior within each channel will vary, and being able to track with channel gets the most clicks or conversions does two things: it provides important behavioral insights and attributes traffic or ROI to a specific channel (or campaign, video, etc)—which both result in improved strategy and ROI.

1. 2. Cross-Media Measurement

Cross-media measurement has changed in the DX 2.0 economy. With new privacy regulations and customers demanding more transparency with how their data is used, accurate and precise CMM can be a challenge. Ad tech agencies and media companies also have less third-party data to rely on, and don’t always have the tools to unify and activate (or even obtain) first-party data in a compliant way—all in real-time. Regardless, viewing, analyzing, and optimizing ad performance and in-flight campaign performance is key to not only driving ad ROI, but understanding how customers behave and interact with ads.

1. 3. Privacy-by-Design Customer 360° Analytics
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3. A true 360° customer view across all digital touchpoints and profiles is essential for ad tech and media brands, but struggle to obtain. More often than not, customer data is siloed, fragmented, and inaccurate, which makes performing analysis with integrity a challenge. Brands need a privacy-centric customer intelligence solution that can perform real-time data ingestion at the source to glean unified, actionable insights from customer profiles faster than ever before—which supports hyper-personalization, CMM, and cross-channel measurement. Customer 360° analytics is the heart of this lucrative data loop, and without it, brands won’t be able to activate customer data to its full potential.

1. 4. Ad Hoc Exploration
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3. The effectiveness of real-time analytics is severely blunted if your brand’s marketing team has to wait on technical teams for answers. Ad hoc exploration is key to answering specific, often one-off questions that can then be iterated upon. However, the challenge when it comes to ad hoc queries is accessibility. Marketing teams need access to ad measurement and behavioral insights, but often don’t have the technical skills to run queries or explore data. With the right solution, though, analytics can be democratized and enable non-technical teams to perform analysis and draw real-time insights.

Ad Tech & Media Success Begins with Scuba

Is your brand poised to succeed in the DX 2.0 economy? 

Scuba can help. Scuba’s real-time, customer intelligence platform empowers brands to activate their customer data to drive efficiency, retention, and ROI.

• Glean rapid, actionable insights with comprehensive 360° customer analytics across all touchpoints and profiles within our intuitive, non-technical UI.
• Optimize ads, user tracking, and data aggregation in real-time with CMM and multi-touch attribution and measurement.
• Drive customer engagement like never before with hyper-personalized CX.
• Protect your data and build customer trust with privacy-driven customer intelligence.

Want to learn more about how to succeed in the DX 2.0 economy? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.