This iteration of Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly Datorama) has been completely rebuilt on the Data Cloud foundation, introducing advanced AI capabilities that transform how marketers manage their campaigns. This Data Cloud foundation immediately unlocks Agentic capabilities to interact with your marketing campaigns. Imagine the ability to pause campaigns that are low performing using natural language. What about asking your Agent to replicate top performing campaigns for a new audience segment? Marketing Intelligence on the foundation of Data Cloud makes this possible.

In addition to its powerful AI capabilities, Marketing Intelligence simplifies the complexities of modern campaign management by tackling key challenges, such as disorganized or low-quality data, time-consuming analysis, and the need for quick, consolidated insights. Let’s explore how the new Marketing Intelligence overcomes these obstacles, empowering marketing teams to achieve their goals with greater precision and efficiency.

Make your data work for you—not the other way around.

Marketers today must interact with myriad data sources and platforms to execute their campaigns. With information coming from various paid media sources—like Meta, LinkedIn and Google Analytics—marketers are tasked with unifying and harmonizing this data to truly understand campaign performance. Furthermore, they must continuously monitor customer behavior across platforms to understand the effectiveness of campaigns and organize everything into a cohesive strategy. 

Marketing Intelligence addresses this issue by making it easy to ingest, transform and map third-party data in just three clicks. Your data is automatically and intelligently mapped, solving common naming convention errors or data inconsistencies across platforms—and if your platforms don’t come with prebuilt integrations, a universal connector lets you ingest flat files without hassle. Even more exciting, you can easily add non-marketing data (like user-level or first-party data) to your marketing performance data giving you richer data sets to analyze. 

But what truly sets this platform apart is its AI-powered data enrichment, which automates the tedious task of categorizing and organizing complex datasets. For example, GenAI can group car brand names into broader vehicle categories, or social media platforms can be unified under a single label. The key here is that GenAI is integrated into the tool and with that comes the ability to automate manual tasks that marketers typically perform. The platform can even recognize patterns in campaign naming conventions to create new and meaningful categories automatically. Many will see this as a game changer in understanding paid media and marketing data. 

By reducing the time spent on manual data wrangling, Marketing Intelligence allows you to focus on what matters: driving results. With accessible and actionable data at your fingertips, you can approach your campaigns with clarity and confidence.

Instantly understand campaign performance with the help of natural-language insights.

Once your data is organized, the next step is understanding its story—and that’s where Marketing Intelligence shines. The platform offers out-of-the-box dashboards powered by Tableau Einstein, providing a clear view of campaign performance across all your channels.

This is more than just a dashboard; it’s an intelligent assistant. Marketing Intelligence uses AI-generated, natural-language summaries to offer an instant overview of your program’s health. Imagine logging in and being presented with plain-language insights that tell you exactly what’s working, what isn’t, and what you should do next based on your goals. This feature eliminates the guesswork and ensures you’re always equipped with actionable insights. The combination of advanced visualizations with intuitive summaries helps you make informed decisions quickly, without having to navigate through complex datasets.

Optimize campaigns in real time, backed by intelligent recommendations.

Achieving campaign goals often requires constant monitoring and adjustment, but that’s easier said than done. Marketing Intelligence simplifies this process with proactive goal-setting and agentic optimizations.

For instance, if you’re aiming to drive leads at a specific cost, Marketing Intelligence allows you to set that goal upfront and continuously track your progress. If the platform detects you’re falling short, it doesn’t just alert you—it provides actionable recommendations. Using Agentforce’s paid media optimization skill, the agent might suggest reallocating budget, autonomously pause under-performing ads, or shift focus to better-performing channels.

This feedback loop ensures you’re not just reacting to results after the campaign ends but actively improving outcomes as they unfold. With plans to expand Agentforce’s capabilities, Salesforce is further investing in tools that enable marketers to stay agile and effective.

Turn your biggest marketing challenges into opportunities.

Marketing Intelligence is a solution designed to transform the way marketers interact with their campaign data. Are you spending too much time wrangling data into usable formats? Struggling to make sense of performance metrics across platforms? Searching for ways to optimize campaigns without wasting valuable resources? Stuck in repetitive, manual processes? This platform offers a streamlined approach to tackling these pain points, helping you achieve faster, smarter and more impactful results.

As a Salesforce Consulting Partner, we’re here to ensure you get the most out of Marketing Intelligence and other Salesforce tools. From implementation to enhancement of the entire Salesforce product stack, our team is ready to guide you every step of the way. Let us know how we can help!

With so many options at hand, brands are spending significant time, money and effort on creating content that sometimes fails to resonate with their target audience and build relevance in the long run. Crafting and sustaining iconic and culturally significant brands has never been a simple undertaking, but the rise of AI and the proliferation of content have further compounded this challenge—especially in a post-pandemic world where consumer attention is increasingly saturated and apathetic towards brand messaging.

If this sounds all too familiar, rest assured that you are not alone. As someone who has experienced these challenges firsthand, I understand the frustration. However, the key lies in recognizing your unique value and identifying the specific opportunities and tools to capitalize on.  

The challenge: navigating a million touchpoints.

In the current landscape, brands encounter two primary challenges when it comes to their marketing efforts. The first one stems from the fact that consumers now place a growing emphasis on authenticity and genuine connections. As a result, their scrutiny of brand content and positioning has escalated. The second challenge has to do with their structure. More often than not, brands’ marketing teams have become more divided and hyper-focused, often operating in isolation with their metrics and objectives, neglecting the broader organizational and long-term strategies.

These teams often operate with a narrow perspective of their responsibilities. Brand teams focus on placing advertisements during prime-time TV slots, while performance teams prioritize generating ROI and revenue. Unfortunately, they often lack awareness of how the other team’s efforts impact their own. On top of that, there are thousands of touchpoints between the TV commercial and the static conversion piece—and it’s very dangerous to ignore them.

Google calls these thousands of mini-steps the messy middle, that place where people are constantly exploring and evaluating different brands and communications, feeding their decision-making biases and buying behavior. According to the 2020 report, the messy middle is a space of abundant information and unlimited choice, where consumers have learned to use cognitive shortcuts to navigate. In the traditional conversion funnel, we usually call this stage consideration, but a lot of potential is lost in considering it a single phase, without the nuances of people’s real consideration behavior. 

Within the messy middle, there is an additional layer to consider when devising a marketing strategy. The consumption of content and media, in general, has changed a lot in the last two decades. What was once a futuristic notion, omnichannel has now become a tangible reality. Consumers now anticipate greater coherence and consistency between their digital and offline experiences. The democratization of content creation, largely propelled by platforms like TikTok, has resulted in audiences transitioning from mere consumers to content producers themselves (today, 41% of Gen Z identify as content creators). Lastly, the range of possibilities for content consumption has expanded exponentially, encompassing various screen sizes and often simultaneous use of multiple screens.

The solution: creativity and personalization take center stage.

Despite the challenges, brands and marketing professionals now have an abundance of resources at their disposal to navigate them and establish a strong strategic position. In a world gradually influenced by artificial intelligence and highly personalized media solutions such as Performance Max, creativity and diversity have become the main characters in a compelling brand narrative. 

Embracing fresh perspectives and harnessing them to fuel creative innovation can transform your brand into a powerhouse. Brands and professionals who skillfully tap into this potential will gain a competitive edge in the years to come. How? To begin with, they must develop a comprehensive content production strategy that aligns with the brand’s mission and values while resonating with the fundamental emotions of the target audience.

It may seem necessary for a brand to be present in every conversation at all times. However, this approach is not only untrue, but can also harm consistency and relationships with loyal consumers. The role of a seasoned and strategic marketing professional is to thoroughly comprehend the core pillars that distinguish the brand and determine where and how its voice will be effectively heard by consumers.

To be relevant today is not about being on every channel, using every format and taking a stance on every issue, but rather about being meaningful wherever you are. With viewers becoming more discerning, capable of deciding within milliseconds whether to engage with content or not, mere presence is insufficient. Brands must strive to be an integral part of the culture, and engage with matters that align with their purpose and target audience.

Cultural listening, a relatively new concept, involves the skill of extracting and reinterpreting behaviors observed in a variety of media, such as TikToks, tweets, Instagram posts, songs, series, and other online or offline content, from a specific community. The objective is to navigate and thrive within a dynamic and ever-changing culture influenced by diverse factors—just look at how quickly TikTok’s viral trends come and go—without losing the brand essence. 

In digital, social networks and content creators serve as powerful tools. They not only allow brands to gauge the cultural zeitgeist but also enable active collaboration with creators to evoke emotional connections and diverse perspectives, thus nurturing creativity. Offline, it is equally crucial to align with culturally relevant events like concerts and gatherings, since this sphere presents additional opportunities for brands to engage with the audience in a sensory and memorable way, fostering deeper communication and connection.

Every channel and touchpoint presents an opportunity to build a brand. At the end of the day, users don’t know the difference between brand and performance, they just know it’s brand communication and will judge it as such. The recipe for success lies in brand and performance teams working more and more closely together, exploring and learning together what the “messy middle” of the business is and how to guide consumers in their decision-making process. 

In the face of apathy, it is culture that brings the solutions that marketing teams seek, while creativity has the power to transform channels and formats into communication powerhouses. It is our responsibility to cultivate sensitivity and incorporate both culture and creativity into our short-, medium-, and long-term marketing planning.

The reason why we measure more and more is straightforward: so that we can forecast the performance of different strategic scenarios, and thereby help the brands we partner with optimize their media efforts. And just like any other discipline within advertising, the field of media continues to evolve, so let’s put a spotlight on what matters right now and will support your media measurement. 

Welcoming incrementality in the media world. 

First, let’s take a step back and look at what incrementality entails. Simply put, it refers to the lift in conversions or sales that can be attributed to a specific advertising campaign above those that would have occurred regardless—also known as the base. Incrementality has recently been adopted by us media folks, and the term has risen in importance because it’s a media measurement solution that isolates the incremental uplift. This matters because otherwise you can’t tell which media is driving growth and which is just harvesting conversions that you would have gotten anyway. As such, incrementality delivers a far more accurate view of how your media channels are driving conversions.

For example, traditional multi-touch attribution (MTA) often fails to separate the base from the uplift of the advertising campaign. This can lead to overstated results. Instead, in order to accurately measure incrementality, it's important to use MTA in conjunction with incremental techniques like market mix modeling (MMM). This way, you can better understand the true impact of advertising campaigns, move from ROAS to ROI, and as such have a more sensible conversation with your finance teams on the effectiveness of media.

How market mix modeling has got media measurement’s back. 

Market mix modeling—sometimes referred to as media mix modeling, but I prefer the former—is certainly not new to the scene, and this technique has been around in its commercial application to understand media uplifts for several decades now. However, the discipline has significantly improved, especially in the last few years.  

Contemporary MMM has come a long way. In the old days, annual updates would take months to bear results, while today you can get a pilot up and running within six weeks and use automation and machine learning to obtain monthly updates in just a matter of days. Besides, visualizations have also become much better, as today’s reporting dashboards offer analysts a plethora of ways to approach the data sets.

It's important to note that market mix models consider the whole market—including drivers like promotions to pricing, the recent pandemic, seasonality and more—and thus offer a holistic view. If you fail to take these other factors into account, you can’t get an accurate read on media and risk overstating its impact. As such, we’re seeing more and more brands partner with specialist MMM experts to help build the market mix models, or work with them to in-house this capability.

I have to point out that some players out there might say they execute “media mix modeling,” but are actually just building a simple regression with media variables or using multi-touch pathway techniques (which is not an incremental analysis). What’s so concerning about this is that they offer so-called MMM solutions at very cheap rates, which may sound appealing, but the damage of using these cannot be underestimated. Basing your decisions on a cheap but bad model could go wrong and cost you over 40% of your media-driven revenue—compared to an increase of roughly 30% if the technique is applied properly. You can make the call on what’s best for your brand.  

Leveraging AI to accelerate our analysis. 

Another very timely reason why I’m so excited about applying market mix modeling is the recent rise of artificial intelligence and the automation solutions that have stemmed from it—AI has been advancing fast in various areas, and it did not forget about MMM. 

At Media.Monks, we’re bullish about AI. That said, we also know that it’s important to be cautious and do our due diligence, especially as we see many AI providers claiming to build market mix models without having the right experience and tools to do so. When it comes to MMM, we believe that AI and automation solutions can be incredibly useful in speeding up the process, but of course there are also some instances that require manual labor. Let’s take a look.  

Raw data and processing. This can be automated using APIs or templates to stream data in, and then pre-ordained processes automate cleaning, saving lots of time. Beware of providers who take several months to initially onboard data pipes, as you really should be up and running in a matter of weeks.

Initial models. We use evolutionary algorithms to automate the initial model build, running thousands of models instantly in the cloud and scoring them, which enables us to arrive at a base model much faster and save weeks across MMM projects with multiple KPIs.

Final models. Note that this (still) requires manual intervention with a very experienced modeling team. We need to sense-check the models, triple-check the data, and use our extensive experience to spot any anomalies and alternative analysis to interrogate any controversial findings.

Sales effects and ROI calculations. These can be automated without the use of AI—this is just a process that can easily be repeated using code.

Automated reporting. Once all the numbers are calculated, it’s easy to automatically populate dashboards and media optimization tools. One thing that can’t be automated, however, is the answering of bespoke client questions around most effective second length, audience, and more. 

Engagement. Reporting ROIs and optimizations is one thing, but gaining an understanding of and trust in the models is another. Therefore, in the early stages of MMM engagements, it's imperative to have people who can explain the models and results to the wider team—not just marketing, but also finance, sales, the board, to name a few. My advice would be to circle back to this in later stages, once people understand and trust the model, and then you can move to more automated reports.

In short, automation can replace a lot of the heavy lifting of data and results processing and visualization, while AI can be used in the initial modeling stage. But what can’t be replaced is the sense-checking, interpretation, and experience of a good modeler to ensure the results are robust, realistic, understood and therefore usable.

Decreasing time, while increasing results. 

In the context of economically uncertain times, a time-saving—and thus cost-saving—solution like market mix modeling, especially when it’s powered by AI and automation, comes in very handy. Based on these models, media measurement typically enables brands to forecast different sales scenarios. In turn, having a robust forecast of performance is critical in justifying different strategic scenarios to the board, owners and investors of a company.

Incrementality is critical in the quest for accurate ROI, and MMM is a main way to get there. Though this technique has been around for decades, its pace of change and adoption rate is accelerating, which I’m sure will be further driven forward by AI. That said, in order for you to reap the many rewards of this tried and tested technique, it’s critical to work with a media partner who includes the whole mix of sales drivers and can take your models from sheer numbers to clear business actions.

1. Amazon Live 

Recently announced, non-endemic clients can now use Amazon Live to launch new offerings and answer questions in real time. In 2023, the vertical view format in Amazon Live will become available for eligible advertisers. 

2. Sponsored Products: performance recommendations 

New performance recommendations, which are in-console, actionable best practices, were unveiled and are now available in ten countries. By troubleshooting in the background, advertisers can utilize these tailored recommendations to boost Sponsored Products ad campaign performance. 

3. Sponsored Products: campaign presets

Advertisers will now be able to create Sponsored Products campaigns with recently launched preset campaign settings, which include the following: 

• Daily budget 
• Bidding strategy
• Targeting strategy
• Associated bids 

These pre-populated campaign settings are based on historical performance and will be pulled to provide advertisers with estimated performance data, including impressions, clicks and conversions. According to Amazon, campaigns launched with presets observed positive results, including a 77% increase in clicks and a 29% increase in conversions.

Combined with expert knowledge, this feature can assist in selecting the right ASINs to run paid advertising. It's important to note that while advertising drives the most highly qualified traffic, your brand needs to be retail-ready to drive conversion and achieve the results you want. 

4. Sponsored Display: Twitch and non-endemic businesses

For non-endemic businesses in verticals not available on Amazon (e.g., restaurants and gyms), US advisers can run Sponsored Display ad campaigns to connect with audiences on Twitch. These campaigns are focused on driving outcomes and improving business performance on the Amazon platform, confirming Amazon's opportunities beyond its own ecosystem. SVP of Ecommerce John Ghiorso talks more about it here. 

While Sponsored Display ads already appear on the Twitch browse tab and directory page, they will now be integrated with Twitch live streams, which bring in 30 million daily visitors on average.

5. Rewarded Sponsored Display 

To incentivize further shoppers, shopping/streaming credits can be added to Streaming TV, Display, and Video campaigns. Brands can add an Amazon credit directly to Sponsored Display creatives, which shoppers can redeem by clicking on the ad and purchasing the advertised product. This will come in closed beta for US advertisers soon. 

To demonstrate the value and utility of this type of experience, a 2021 Amazon Ads survey of US adult Amazon shoppers showed that 92% of respondents are more likely to take action if offered an Amazon shopping credit.

6. Sponsored Display: Brand Store traffic 

To drive traffic and brand growth on the Amazon platform, advertisers can now use their video ads to redirect shoppers to the Brand Stores with Sponsored Brands video creatives. This new feature introduces a broader product catalog and increases engagement with shoppers without distractions from competing offers. 

7. Sponsored Display: video creative enhancements 

New video capabilities to enhance Sponsored Display’s creative allows advertisers to showcase products and the brand through immersive storytelling such as tutorials, demos, unboxing and testimonials. This means advertisers using Sponsored Display audiences can build awareness on and off Amazon with 45-second videos and link shoppers directly to the product detail page for further purchase consideration. 

It was also recently announced that non-endemic advisers will soon be able to run Sponsored Display ad campaigns focused on driving outcomes and improving positioning on Amazon O&O. 

For smaller brands with limited creative capabilities, a new beta Video Builder tool provides customizable templates to create ad campaigns in under ten minutes. Video ads can appear above the SRP for Sponsored Brands and Sponsored Display campaigns. As advertisers, it's still vital to keep in mind the importance of organic placement and avoid being a pay-to-play brand on Amazon.  

According to third-party research from Wyzowl, 73% of consumers say they prefer video ads to learn about products and services, and 88% say video ads have convinced them to buy.

8. Amazon Demand-Side-Platform (DSP): performance enhancements 

Campaign improvements have been made to decrease setup time to 15 minutes, optimizing efficiency and productivity. A few notable changes include: 

• Addition of a "Change History" feature to track campaign changes and impact on performance 
• Updated algorithm to include "keep learning" and ingest more signals that result in better outcomes 
• Amazon Ad Tag is moving from IMG to JS, which will enable 1 pixel for all events that are being tracked and drive richer insights with no requirements of third-party identifiers.
• Amazon Audiences are automatically updated to improve signals beyond third-party identifiers
• Contextual Targeting (beta) based on Amazon's retail taxonomy and in-the-moment content consumption with 40K categories available 
• Amazon Brand Lift is now available for UK advertisers in Amazon DSP 

These changes show that Amazon DSP's extensive targeting capabilities will continue to evolve, allowing advertisers to dial in on what's working and what's not. 

9. Digital Signage Ads

Starting in November 2022, eligible advertisers can programmatically purchase ad space in Amazon Fresh stores by utilizing the new inventory opportunity within Amazon DSP. With these Digital Signage Ads programmatically placed in Amazon's stores, customers will see more relevant ads and have the opportunity to physically engage with brands. Brands and advertisers can customize ad placements, daypart and measure performance for meaningful results, which allows for efficient optimization and improved customer experience.

At unBoxed 2022, Amazon shared that Digital Signage Ads within Amazon Fresh stores resulted in a 40% sales lift for Kraft.

10. Streaming TV Ads

Along with Thursday Night Football, streaming TV ad placements during Premier League games are now available in the UK. Advertisers can also utilize incremental household reach, a post-campaign reporting solution, to measure incremental audience reached. By combining first-party and third-party signals, advertisers can ensure accurate, aggregated results augmented by machine learning-based projections.

11. Amazon Marketing Stream

Amazon Marketing Stream launched globally in October 2022, with the exception of India. By expanding to all countries within the Amazon Ads API, this new service delivers hourly campaign metrics to advertisers’ AWS accounts via a push-based model. It provides details such as targeting expression performance by placement and budget consumption messages. 

Advertisers can expect additional hourly Sponsored Display data to come soon, which can be used for further campaign optimization. Amazon goes on to say that brands can benefit from Amazon Marketing Stream in the following ways: 

• Optimize campaigns more effectively
• Respond quickly to campaign changes
• Improve operational efficiency 

12. Amazon Marketing Cloud 

Currently, Amazon advertisers can utilize ad signals of Sponsored Products and Amazon DSP media. With the recent addition of Sponsored Display signals in Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), advertisers can dive deeper into cross-media attribution and better understand the customer journey. Along with the additional signals, companion instructional queries (IQs) were launched to guide advertisers on cross-media attribution, the overlap into Amazon DSP, and other common Sponsored Display analytics. 

Based on customer feedback, Amazon Ads has focused on building AMC capabilities across four areas: 

1. Signal coverage. Advertisers can now build queries to analyze bidding efficacy, cross-publisher attribution, and total reach through integration with Sizmek Ad Suite. These Sponsored Brands signals will be added in early 2023. 

This integration is valuable as it allows advertisers to measure the impact of non-Amazon media on Amazon conversions and achieve more comprehensive cross-channel attribution, further fine-tuning the planning strategy across each phase of the marketing funnel. 

Christina Bender, Director of Amazon Partnerships, noted, “If you use Amazon Attribution to measure the effectiveness of your non-Amazon media driving Amazon.com metrics, testing out Sizmek would be a natural next step to see how that data can be queried within AMC.”

2. Ease of use. Within the past year, AMC's Instructional Query library increased from 10 to more than 50 pre-built queries serving as advertising playbooks on AMC.  

3. Actionable insights. Brands will soon be able to manage their Amazon DSP audiences within AMC, enabling audience creation via an SQL statement. 

4. Partner programs. Ask us about your Amazon services!

Final thoughts from Amazon unBoxed

With the recent updates, Amazon has laid a landscape that brands can utilize for incremental business growth. A revenue increase in Q3 turned things around for Amazon, who reported total sales of $127 billion (a 15% increase compared to last year), and a 13% jump in ecommerce sales YoY.

That growth brings opportunities for brands to end the year on a strong note. Not keeping up with Amazon’s innovations may lead to missed opportunities in revenue, especially as it remains the go-to marketplace in the US. Through the power of storytelling and advertising, advertisers can showcase their brand story and products without the distractions of competitors or offers, on and off Amazon. 

There is a lot to unpack here, but our team is eager to explore these new rollouts with you! Reach out to an Amazon Ads Specialist today to game plan a winning strategy on the Amazon platform.