Today’s CMOs have a lot on their plate: their role is increasingly responsible for overall business growth, managing brand communications, customer experience and in some cases the adoption of new technologies. Each of these responsibilities touch upon the different ways that consumers interact with a brand, making it essential for CMOs—and their teams—to manage a wide-lens view of the consumer journey. But in order to successfully integrate business objectives with data and customer experience, they’ll need to establish marketing strategies in which both work hand-in-hand to support one another.

By achieving this through constant performance measurement and optimization of content, organizations empower themselves to adopt a more agile process of marketing, which enables them to rapidly experiment and optimize campaign content and media spend through engagement. This culture of experimentation—with results to back it up—is key to achieving the always-on stream of content that today’s consumer expects, offering several relevant, personalized permutations of a message rather than the “big idea” campaign that was so popular in the past.

Close the Loop on End-to-End Marketing

Effective marketing today isn’t born just from an initial set of figures, but in fact results in new data that can be used to further optimize that content. This strengthens the creative so that it remains relevant to consumers along the digital journey. Whether an initial set of metrics lives up to expectations or not, data-confident organizations that continually measure performance may use those insights to increase content effectiveness, save in costs over the long-term and maintain trust in their creative partners.

Think about what a campaign that uses data poorly looks like. We’ve all found ourselves haunted by a product we’ve viewed (or even purchased) in our travels across the internet—an experience that can come off as annoying or even downright creepy. That this situation is all too common demonstrates how brands often miss key opportunities for effective retargeting or adapting their message to consumers’ changing priorities or intents. Those who continually optimize content through an agile process rapidly gain and apply new insights to adapt their message to the consumer’s interests or place in the sales funnel, resulting in more relevant and effective targeting.

We took this end-to-end approach in a recent awareness campaign for Gladskin, the Dutch skincare brand, and their award-winning acne treatment. The processes described below enabled the brand to five-times lower CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) and higher-than-forecasted reach. To achieve this, we measured what content brought audiences past initial engagement, then applied those insights to continually change the positioning, messaging and creative for greater results.

Optimizing Content for Increased Relevance

As with any campaign, this one began with an initial set of research on a hypothesized audience. Through preliminary engagements from consumers, we were able to quickly zero in on key insights that informed the next phase of production and user targeting. For example, we noticed that Instagram Story content focusing on models’ faces performed especially well in the awareness stage; this content achieved a 37% higher CTR than story content that focused on the product’s effect on the skin.

This aligned well with what you would expect from a platform like Instagram, as the face-focused content was akin to your standard beauty deliverable. But we found that the opposite was true in the consideration phase: Instagram Story content that performed better at this stage fixated on the skin and science behind the product.

Similarly, content that drove more users to convert focused on the research behind the product’s award-winning formula and customer testimonials, depending on the format used. The former was most effective with carousels that let users dive deeper into the product benefits in detail, while the latter performed best in single-image link ads.

Which type of message performs best per platform or format isn’t set in stone; it’s different per campaign, driving home the importance of closely measuring performance across the course of any campaign. But what both winning formats in the consideration and purchase phases had in common was that they provided consumers with justification to buy after their interest had initially been piqued, a key insight for subsequent retargeting efforts.

One can imagine how sticking to a single type of content throughout the consumer journey is comparatively ineffective in pushing consumers through the funnel; think back on that example of a product listing stalking a customer who happened upon it once. By highlighting new insights through frequent A/B testing, we could rapidly remix transformable assets into more and more attractive deliverables—and even support new creative formats, like Instant Experiences on Facebook.

Boost ROI with Optimized Spend

Cracking the code to the most thumb-stopping, relevant messages to consumers is one thing, but it doesn’t do anyone good when those messages fall on deaf ears. In addition to optimizing content, agile marketing processes let you plug data in to deeply target new groups (or continue to retarget engaged ones) for continued success.

For Gladskin, we worked with Brainlabs (an award-winning digital marketing agency) on a new approach to organizing target interests. Rather than sort them by theme—in this case, things like “teenage skincare” or “acne treatment”—we identified how well each individual interest performed. From there, we divided the top-performing ones from the bottom.

Weekly reporting enabled us to continually replace the lowest-performing interests with new ones. Over time, this process will result in ever-higher engagement rates and reach into new, increasingly relevant audiences over the course of the campaign. Tied with the process of optimizing insights-driven content as detailed above, this end-to-end approach is truly reactive to audience engagements and intents.

As measurement becomes increasingly essential for CMOs to improve customer experience, increase communication effectiveness and drive overall business goals, brands must embrace agile processes that allow for the continuous optimization of campaigns. This repeated experimentation through closed-loop, end-to-end systems provides brands with the insights they need to achieve specific business outcomes for long-term success.

Performance marketing is just the first step.

Brands face several challenges when it comes to using data effectively: organizing it in a way to ensure that it’s usable, extracting actionable insights that optimize creative, and envisioning how to translate abstract data into tangible value. That’s why we recently released Unlocking Data & Silos to Enhance Creative Potential, a guide touching upon each of these issues and more, opening with a foreword that explores one of the most urgent challenges defined by Forrester that CMOs face today: solving the CMO-CIO paradox at a time when both roles’ strategic alignment is so crucial to organizational success. You can read the foreword below, or grab the ebook in full right here.

The promise of big data was always to give organizations the insights they required to take their relationship with consumers to the next level. While some have achieved this, others have struggled to digitally transform and transition into an environment in which they can organize and activate the mountains of data that they’re sitting on.

This might make it sound like big data is a big problem for some, but that’s a defeatist way of looking at things; rather, the challenge offers an opportunity for organizations to break down silos and work together more effectively, particularly when it comes to the relationship between CMOs, CIOs and their teams. CMOs find themselves tasked with driving organizational growth through their ownership of the brand-customer experience, for example, and doing so requires joining together multiple streams of data into a comprehensive, single view of the customer—which means a data architecture must be in place to define the data and KPIs necessary to measure results and infer more about consumers.

Of course, this presents an excellent opportunity for CIOs to tie their technology strategy to clear business goals, elevating their role into a more strategic one. The problem? In most organizations, the CMO and CIO aren’t closely aligned. In fact, Forrester Research reports that only 16% of B2C decision makers say that their roles function together as strategic partners. 35%, meanwhile, say that IT merely manages one-off projects that are prioritized by the needs of the company.

One way for CMOs to kickstart a closer relationship with their CIO is to build a unified data strategy and break down silos in the process. Historically, both have had differing business perspectives—sometimes so misaligned that marketing teams would turn to external point solutions rather than rely on IT for handling data. Such practices have only widened the divide even further because data extracted this way is often framed for a specific purpose and incompatible with other systems used within the organization—diminishing CMOs’ ability to forecast into the future and truly lead in the digital transformation process.

This presents the ultimate irony: CMOs find themselves with greater responsibility to drive growth and serve the brand strategically, yet often find marketing projects deprioritized. Strengthening their relationship with IT is key in establishing the tools they need to deliver on this responsibility, but first they must increase their data literacy and learn to better align marketing KPIs to clear business outcomes that move the needle.

With a greater understanding of data strategy and how to support it with a cross-organizational data architecture, CMOs can achieve the buy-in they need from IT and the brand as a whole—and take back control at a time when extracting consumer insights at a quickened pace has become so critical. According to the same Forrester report noted above, CIOs who have worked closely with their CMOs report a 1.3-time likelihood of substantial growth year over year. Now that’s a data point to get excited by. Through the lens of attaining a better understanding of your consumers and enhancing the power of creative, this book sets out to show how you, too, can break down silos and elevate your role into a strategic driver of growth.

There are many more benefits to strengthening your data strategy.

This week, New York welcomed not only foreign leaders and dignitaries at the United Nations headquarters—the city also embraced some of the best and brightest in the world of advertising, marketing and technology. Yes, Advertising Week New York—one of six Advertising Week events held around the world—came to offer thought leadership, workshops and more with 1,216 speakers and over 290 different events.

There was much to ponder and celebrate throughout the week. At the Clio Awards, eight awards were distributed among three projects that we contributed to: the Uncensored Playlist, Mind the Gap and the geolocation-based revamp of the “Runaway Train” music video. We also made placement on Adweek’s 100 Fastest Growing Agencies list, and our VP of Marketing Kate Richling was shortlisted for Advertising Week’s Future is Female platform.

But that’s enough patting ourselves on the back. What were the brands up to in all the fray? Our recap explores three big topics from one of the biggest weeks in advertising—namely what’s driving the in-housing trend, how brands are working creatively with data and the new collaborative partnerships that are helping brands respond to both those opportunities.

Getting Closer to Consumers through In-Housing

One thing that’s become undoubtedly clear across the course of the week is that brands are seeking ways to take back control. For many, this has manifest in a trend to take their creative and media capabilities in-house. Often attributed to goals like lowering cost or time to market, there are in fact many reasons why brands feel they can do creative better on their own terms and turf, as explored at the Brand Innovators summit, which coincided with Advertising Week.

A major goal behind the in-housing trend is a need to get closer to the consumer. As traditional brands grow with widening product lines and more channels to communicate through, they risk losing coherence or consistency within the brand-consumer relationship.

At a panel on in-housing, Spencer Gordon of Anheuser-Busch discussed how going in-house ensured that a dedicated team in the brand would always be thinking about creative. This enabled them to pursue consumers with greater relevance and brand understanding. But Gordon noted that the initiative achieved big results by first starting small; with four employees focused on providing social assets solely for the Michelob Ultra product, the team has since scaled to 63 members that deliver for all of AB InBev’s brands.

In the same panel, Ryan Riess, Director of Social Strategy and Content at the Hershey Company, similarly discussed how supporting such a large variety of brands (15 of them!) drove them to become more consumer-centric. Hershey felt they could do creative better on their own—particularly in creating platform-specific content that would better connect with their customers. That’s a very specific way that brands can better drive relevance by maintaining an always-on relationship with their consumers, requiring brands to have a clear idea not only of themselves, but their consumers as well.

Purposeful Use of Data for Empathy and Impact

How brands can gain that understanding of the consumer was another major topic of discussion throughout the week. But businesses have come up with interesting ways to accomplish this; a notable example is Target’s internal media company Roundel. In the Advertising Week panel “Climbing Over Walls: Real People Data in an Automated World,” Roundel’s VP Dave Peterson noted: “The data is extremely important, but it’s as much on the human side as it is on the data. We call it the IQ side for data and the EQ for the human side of things.”

This purposeful interplay between both the technical and emotional sides of data provides Roundel with learnings they can use to strengthen the relationship between the retailer, their customers and the CPG partners whose products line the shelves. “Going back to our enterprise view at Target about putting our guests at the center of everything we do, our goal really is to enhance the shopping experience,” Peterson said. “Media works best when it’s in everyone’s benefit.”

And that’s a point that resonates well with MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar, who gave a keynote address at the Brand Innovators event on Tuesday afternoon. Exploring the challenge between what he calls “personalized pleasure versus personalized panic”—that delicate balance between consumers’ desire for relevance and concern for privacy—he honed in on the need for empathy to become a driving force in everything you do. “We can never stop prioritizing empathy,” he said. “Empathy and engineering must work hand-in-hand in the future.”

Closing the Creative and Data Divide

While Roundel is an interesting example of bridging together the intelligent and emotional quotients in data, they’re not alone: several brands noted the need for marketing and IT to come together to deliver unforgettable customer experiences that build brand love. On the panel “Rethinking TV: Driving Growth, Relationships and Experience Through Data,” Sir Martin Sorrell joined GM’s Global CMO Deborah Wahl, where the two examined how brands must look beyond the typical TVC approach for more scalable, personal and relevant creative.

Wahl gave her brand’s perspective on how impact and effectiveness are table stakes today, and how she works closely with data to achieve it. “We have a chief data officer at GM. We spend a lot of time together, really understanding: ‘What are you learning, what are the insights, how are we going after it?’” she said. “That helps you form better creative briefs so you get a big idea, and then really make sure we can execute that across different channels.”

It sounds like GM has a good rhythm going, but for many brands, closing that IT and creative gap can feel like a struggle. Showing teamwork in action, the S4 family—Sir Martin, ter Haar and Emily Del Greco (President of the Americas, MightyHive)—came together the following day to join Joana Coles (Founder and CCO, Boudica) in a panel discussion about the S4 Capital model and its place within the future of advertising. Coles set the scene for discussion: if you’re not a holding company, she asked, “What the hell are you then?”

The trio’s responses became a multi-faceted examination of collaboration and partnership. Sir Martin drew a line between how S4 operates versus holding companies that impose constraints around the businesses they contain. Instead, he suggested, S4 took inspiration from tech companies who are disruptive by nature. Ter Haar added: “With traditional work, there’s a conservatism that you can’t marry data with being creative.” It’s precisely that challenge that brands are grappling with now, driving that need for control examined above.

Del Greco noted how aligning data and creative so closely together enables brands to take more risks with confidence. “MediaMonks is about taking the risk, and MightyHive comes quickly with feedback [backed by data],” she said. As iteration and agility have become key to success in today’s always-on environment, this ability to experiment and take learnings will become crucial for future-focused brands.

As Advertising Week draws to a close, we’re energized by the creative wins that brands have have been able to share. Looking at the next year into the future, it will be interesting to see how the landscape further evolves—and how new partnerships will enable brands to achieve a more customer-led focus by closing the gap between data and creative.

If there’s ever a place that teaches you how decision-making requires careful planning and data, it might as well be Vegas—no one wants to press their luck with a blind bet. This week, marketers and leadership from brands both big and small descended upon the city for Adobe Summit 2019, a three-day conference dedicated to providing best-in-class customer experiences by leveraging consumer data.

The summit kicked off with a slew of new features announced for the Adobe Experience Cloud that allow brands to better understand their customers and make decisions backed by user data. In Adobe Analytics Cloud, for example, organizations will now receive real-time customer data—both known and anonymous—to activate profiles across channels throughout the customer journey (including offline). Unveiling the integration of its Magento and Marketo acquisitions, another major theme touted at the conference was a focus on “business to everyone” (B2E) marketing, a trend in which personalization and customer experience will be critical to success.

Ask anyone at the conference what the prevailing, over-arching theme of the sessions has been and they’ll likely say that it’s customer obsession. The focus on customer experience has been so strong as of late that Adobe’s Senior & Strategic Editor for Enterprise Thought Leadership calls it “Digital Transformation 2.0,” and key leadership from Fortune 500 shared how they use data to cultivate strong relationships with their customers (find out what some of them had to say below). The message is clear: with front-end customer experience as a key differentiator, organizations of all sizes must use data smartly and responsibly to maintain relevancy with consumers.

Brands Must Rethink How They Engage with Customers

The brands that lead in customer experience set their sights beyond just product; instead, they seek to provide services that enhance users’ relationships with the brand or its products. When Best Buy faced intense competition with Amazon, for example, the electronics retailer shifted its focus. “We are not in the business of selling products or doing transactions with you,” Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly told the conference audience. “Our purpose is to enrich lives with the help of technology.”

Best Buy now offers several services to help customers along the user journey both in and out of brick-and-mortar stores, but perhaps most interesting is its Tech Advisors service, which provides free, in-home consultations to prospective customers. In a visit, Best Buy’s tech experts hear out customers’ needs and provide advice, whether it be product recommendations or even entire home media setup plans. There’s no commitment to purchase, providing real value to customers without pressure to buy.

This focus doesn’t just help build a relationship with customers; it also anticipates how emerging tech will further prompt brands to seek out new opportunities informed by data. Internet of Things devices, for example, are growing in popularity—and may rapidly proliferate after mass adoption of 5G connections. As the digital ecosystems in consumers’ homes become more complex, so will customers’ questions about them. Such a service will certainly prove useful for helping homeowners get connected and understand how the technology available can improve their lives; likewise, brands should continually seek out the potential of emerging tech to provide new, personalized experiences that build equity and help connect to consumer need.

Provide Value by Using Data Responsibly

Providing this level of personalized service digitally requires a sophisticated understanding of user preferences on an individual level—and that requires smart use of data. Unfortunately, a big challenge that brands face in producing insights-driven content is that their data is often siloed, or there’s simply too much of it to organize or draw conclusions from. “Overcoming organizational and data silos is key to putting customers at the center of your digital business and delivering a leading experience,” said Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen at the summit. By breaking down internal barriers and pulling together stakeholders across an organization, a more holistic view of customers’ engagement with a brand across the customer journey emerges.

Another key takeaway from the conference is that the use of data must come from a place of empathy and transparency. While explaining his vision for innovation, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella posed an important question for brand leaders: “What is the real source of inspiration, the necessary conditions to get your strategy and products? One is a sense of purpose and the other is culture.”

Taking those words to heart, businesses seeking to retain and unlock user data must do so with a sense of purpose and a desire to improve lives. “People want to be heard, not overheard,” said MediaMonks co-founder Wesley ter Haar. There’s a lot of consumer unease around collection of data, “which stems from approaching data without empathy,” says ter Haar. “If organizations implemented solutions informed by the empathetic use of data, they’d be far more successful and not creep people out.”

The sky’s the limit with insights-driven content.

Here’s what that level of transparency looks like: when we worked with creative agency GSD&M to redesign the US Air Force website, the platform simply asked readers their gender, education/professional level and goals. The page informs users that their experience with the site is be custom-built from this information, explaining the up-front use and value of the data. The website is powered by Adobe Creative Cloud and dynamically surfaces up content based on readers’ activity, helping them envision what to expect from a military career and how it can help them achieve their professional goals. The result is a website that provides a highly personalized experience populated with relevant content—without asking readers to blindly hand over sensitive or personal data.

It all boils down to trust: “While personalization cannot happen without data and intelligence,” Narayen told his audience, “it should not happen without trust and transparency.” As brands seek to build deeper relationships with their consumers, brands must not only leverage data smarter, but also more responsibly. Used in this way, organizations have the tools in place they need to connect with consumers through value-based, personalized and insight-driven content.