Stats Which Prove Marketers Are Struggling With Cross-Device Identification – And How They’re Working to Solve It

At the DMA’s Annual event held this past October 16-18, we heard from several companies – LiveIntent, Oracle Data Cloud, LiveRamp, Acxiom, MediaMath and Conversant – whose leadership discussed the challenges of properly communicating with customers across multiple devices. The challenge isn’t communicating to the device, its communicating to the customer. The right customer with the right message. Some marketers argue that marketing has been directed at solely devices since the advent of the smart phone, and that the need to return to marketing to PEOPLE is an urgent need.

Relevance is key, and without it customers will tune out marketers. Or worse, they will install ad-blocking software.

A few stats across the industry to highlight the current state of cross-device marketing and its growing prominence in 2016 and beyond. The future of marketing is here.

•     Consumers, on average, own 7.2 devices per household and are using 3 or more on a daily basis. Marketers typically only see 1 (Source: Adobe Analytics & ADI Device Use Survey).
•     At our best, we only have visibility into a third of household devices. What vital information are we not capturing with this limited view? TwitterLogo_#55acee
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•     Nearly 40% of transactions are involving multiple devices and 30% customers are completing the sale on a mobile device (Source: Criteo Mobile eCommerce Report).
•     How can you be sure you are speaking accurately and relevantly with your customers? To remain competitive, marketers must deliver a seamless, fully-connected cross-device marketing, media and customer experience.
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•     37% of marketers say the lack of a Single Customer View is inhibiting them from marketing across channels (Source: Experian’s “Single Customer View Whitepaper”).
•     Digital technologies continue to evolve and the amount of data available to us continues to explode. Despite it, we are still struggling to get an accurate picture of our customers.
•     Over 50% of marketers say that cross-channel measurement and attribution is occupying the most time and resources this year (Source: Winterberry and IAB).
•     This number is sure to increase in 2017. There are solutions out there and DMA can help you through the process of selecting a provider by using their cross-device RFI template.
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•     84% of marketers feel that a comprehensive cross-device strategy is essential for success though only 20% feel very confident that they’re serving the right message on the right device. (Source: Atlas by Facebook).
•     Marketers need to close this gap. Even though the customer is using multiple devices; we need to communicate to the customer, not the device.

To tackle these challenges and improve the cross-device marketing ecosystem, DMA’s Cross-Device ID (XDID) Structured Innovation Program has brought together marketers, media buyers, ad sellers and XDID solution providers, with the goal of elevating the market’s XDID “IQ”, reducing implementation barriers, and ultimately making it easier for XDID buyers and sellers to do business with confidence.