The wild ride we experienced in 2020 took many of the predictions made at the beginning of the year to an extreme.
Plenty predicted a trend toward more remote work, but no one imagined the whole-cloth lift and shift that happened in the spring. Many said ecommerce would expand, but no one predicted its growth would accelerate by five years.
Despite the volatility and chaos of 2020, 2021 is going to be the year of future-proofing against the unpredictable. Being caught off guard and unable to keep pace with consumer demand and expectations can’t be repeated. The pandemic inspired some of our best and most creative minds to move us forward, and we should spend 2021 putting the lessons we learned into practice, including:
Marketing KPIs need to change
The way we measure marketing performance will undergo a great reset in 2021. CROs and CFOs will expect answers from everyone in the aftermath of the pandemic, so brands and agencies will focus on revising their digital strategies to show their value. Much of the year will be spent building ways to better capture return on ad spend (ROAS) and collect metrics that prove the ROI of the software and services powering marketing efforts.
Instead of rebuilding existing attribution models to mimic the tracking and targeting enabled by third-party cookies, marketers and agencies will have to look beyond conversions and layer in a broader array of data and insights to show cause and effect. Establish a data strategy that incorporates more than media performance.
Embracing a privacy-first culture will come from the top
Last year proved a particularly tumultuous year for cyberattacks and ransomware, which saw a spike during the pandemic. These particularly high-profile security lapses have captured the attention of nervous executives. In the year ahead, we can expect to see the ad industry follow in the footsteps of Big Tech’s self-guided push to become more privacy-focused, especially in light of progressive consumer data privacy regulation.
It’s no longer a question of whether an industrywide privacy framework will arise, but when. Businesses need to ask themselves if they want to ride the wave or let it take them under. To prepare, you’ll likely need to restructure certain data and metrics operations and rethink existing processes to embrace a privacy-first culture.
First-party data will be the new gold mine
In 2021, we will see a shift toward greater reliance on first-party data. As more businesses focus their digital marketing tactics around first-party, we’ll see greater investment in contextual advertising and machine learning.
This happens with data engineering. Agencies and internal marketing teams will need to become truly data-engineered, and they are going to have to hire talent that can do the hard work of trudging through the data and bringing it all together to make it understandable and actionable. Data engineers will be highly valued because they uniquely understand a brand’s first-party data and can plug it into walled garden applications for customer acquisition purposes.
The way we advertise to consumers and their expectations have experienced an about-face, and the regulatory and market landscape is permanently changed. Our definitions of success, our customers’ privacy and our own teams need to evolve in 2021. The changes we make now in how we measure and attribute value to our efforts will future-proof us against the next great disruption.
