The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens
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The document discusses the concept of "Open Gardens", which is a new approach to marketing that connects an organization's entire marketing ecosystem at the data layer. This allows for a unified view of customer data across channels to deliver personalized, relevant experiences. Some key benefits include increased revenue, extended reach, improved marketing performance and efficiency, and future-proofing investments. The document advocates that marketers take control of their data and partnerships using this Open Garden approach.
The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens
- 1. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens A bold new era of collaborative, people-based, every-channel marketing and how you can master it
- 2. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 2 1.The market realities driving the Open Garden movement 2.The business outcomes Open Garden can drive 3.The business challenges Open Garden can solve 4.The innerworkings ofan Open Garden 5. Howto buildyourown to take the next big leap formarketing What’s inside?
- 3. “Itwas the best oftimes, itwas theworst oftimes, itwas the age ofwisdom, itwas the age offoolishness, itwas the epoch ofbelief, itwas the epoch ofincredulity…” Charles Dickens,ATale ofTwo Cities “Sounds familiar.” Everymarketer
- 4. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 4 Ifyou’re a marketer,you’re living in interesting times. Ifyou’re a seniormarketer– and the majorityofyourcareer happened in the pre-digital era –you’re experiencing a bizarre combination of dream, nightmare and category5 hurricane. The dream Ifyour pre-digital self had a marketing wish list, the new era has delivered pretty much everything on it: You have more data onyour customers – more insight into their behaviors, preferences and propensities than you could ever have dreamed of. You have countless newways to reach people – with new channels popping up faster than you can say Snapchat. You have an overwhelming range of technologies, applications and platforms – to help you listen, analyze, plan, predict, activate, engage, test, measure, model and optimize. All this has combined to turn marketing from a guess-based, hunch-driven art form into a measurable, accountable, data-driven discipline. Today, CMOs that used to have to master the boardroom tap-dance are now batting back the toughest questions and building irrefutable business cases for bigger budgets. All good. In fact, all great. What is going on here?
- 5. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 5 The nightmare The same tsunami of innovation that gives you all this power and opportunity has also created something not-so-helpful. It’s created chaos. Your people-based data is scattered across anywhere from a dozen to a hundred different channels, silos, applications and product teams. There’s a massive gulf between your offline world (stores, contact centers, CRM, email...) and your digital world (web, social, mobile...). The campaign management and analytics in your martech stack are entirely divorced from the DMPs and programmatic tools in your adtech world. The demands of consumer privacy and data protection regulations mean you're walking a tightrope in trying to manage all of this. Any of these demands would make it exponentially harder to get even a fuzzy, pixellated view ofyour customer much less a crystal-clear single view of the customer in all her omnichannel glory. Not so good. And not even the whole storyyet.
- 6. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 6 The category 5 hurricane If all this complexitywasn’t enough, you also have to dealwith change. Rapidly accelerating change on literally every front. A non-stop firehose of new data tools, technologies, techniques, channels, regulations, innovations and vendors make it harder to stay the course even for a few quarters, much less plan for the next fewyears. Away forward Ifyou’re a senior marketer, you’ve got one of the most challenging, exciting, nerve-wracking, high-stakes rides of any job in any industry in the world. The bad news: a lot of people out there will promise you they can take allyour complexity awaywith a single wave of their cloud-based wand. (Spoiler alert: they can’t). The good news: there actually is a way foryou to take control ofyour entire marketing ecosystem so that you control and manage your data, using it to drive better-informed analysis and more meaningful and relevant interactions in every channel. The key to this new approach is that you’re not giving up control to anyvendor or limiting your reach to any channel or application. In fact, you’re taking back that control, so you can deepen your understanding ofyour customers, serve them better everywhere and focus your budget where it will make the most impact. This is big. Read on.
- 7. Whenyour‘best-of-breed’ won’t stop breeding The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 7 Ifyours is like most marketing teams,you’ve made lots of good decisions aboutwhich tools and platforms to use for allthe different things today’s marketers have to do. This best-of-breed approach isn’t just necessary — it’s almost certainly the right way to go. But there are some serious penalties that come with your fragmented marketing stack. Here are just a few: • You can see what’s happening in any given channel, but you can’t assemble all those interactions into a single view of each customer. • Even ifyou did have a complete, single view, you can’t recognize people everywhere, so you can’t activate what you know about each person to give them consistently relevant experiences. • You can’t model entire customer journeys or see howyour online activities drive offline sales. As marketing gets more expensive and more competitive, these limitations move from painful to unsustainable. Beyond thewarehouse Someone has to say it: your traditional marketing stack – built around a marketing data warehouse – is not equipped for this new, omnichannel challenge. The velocity, variety, dynamism and sheer messiness of today’s marketing data is simply not what the old-school databases were built for. There’s still a place foryour warehouse (and you’ve invested way too much in it to even consider ripping and replacing it now) but you can’t let its inherent rigidity limit your agility. In short, there’s a growing mismatch between your strategy and your ability to execute on it. And that mismatch causes missed opportunities, wasted budgets and the kind of irrelevant marketing that, instead of charming people, annoys them.
- 8. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 8 Relevance everywhere Uniting the marketing ecosystem at the data layer In marketing, relevance wins every time. An offer or a message that’s relevant to a person – that reflects who they are, what they love and what they want right now – is many times more likely to convert than a generic, broadcast-style message. Delivering this kind of relevance every time you touch a consumer isn’t just the fast track to revenue, it’s also the high road to remarkable levels of loyalty and lifetime value. Clearly, the only way to deliver this kind of every- channel relevance is to unite your entire marketing ecosystem. And the only place to do that is at the data layer. Untilyou can do that, every one of your marketing applications or channels will continue to speak its own language, with its own data schema and proprietary customer IDs. Connecting everything at the data layer lets you keep the marketing and advertising platforms, partners, applications and channels that you love while benefiting from the integrations that are critical to every-channel success.
- 9. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 9 What is the data layer? Right now, marketing integrations tend to happen at the application layer, generally through APIs or custom-built connectors. So your Salesforce instance can push data to Marketo oryour Unica can push data to Adobe Analytics or Mailchimp orwhat have you. Maybe you even use two-way syncing to keep each system up to date. The trouble is, as your systems multiply, the integration spaghetti becomes impossible to manage and maintain. And you’re soon back in silo-land. When you connect at the data layer, you create consumer portraits centrally – in a data environment that you control – ingesting data from each system (for analysis, modeling and segmentation) and publishing data back to each, as needed (for activation and engagement). Seemingly small changes make a world of difference – to your agility, transparency, and your ability to deliver relevance everywhere.
- 10. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 10 Open Garden gives you a data foundation that’s rich soil for omnichannel growth. Introducing Open Garden The next big leap formarketing Open Garden is a new blueprint for a marketing and advertising ecosystem that’s connected at the data layer. An Open Garden foundation lets you bridge offline and digital, adtech and martech to drive the smarter, more relevant, more consistent every-channel experiences that win markets. This new foundation layer isn’t about technical elegance (though it approaches beautywhen done right) – it’s all about hard-nosed marketing outcomes. Specifically, Open Garden can: Boostyourrevenue – byliftingyour click-throughs, engagement levels, conversion rates and cross-sales Extendyour reach – activating your data wherever your best audiences are Proveyour increasing ROI – the mother of all metrics In the rest of this guide, we’ll take you through Open Garden and the strategic and technical decisions you need to make to get there. For now, keep one idea in mind: when you build your own Open Garden, you turn your collection of independent marketing applications, tools and platforms into a connected ecosystem that recognizes your customers everywhere so you can deliver relevance.
- 11. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 11 This is inevitable Open Garden is a broad movement across the industry (it just hasn't been named until now). The movement reflects an inevitable trend in all tech markets: from closed to open; from fragmented to connected; from isolated to collaborative; from budget-leaking to value-creating. The Open Garden movement is the market’s response to the unsustainable fragmentation and silo-ization of today’s marketing environments. Howit’s different Unlike the fragmented marketing ecosystems of today, an Open Garden creates a connected, collaborative marketing ecosystemwhere everything and everyone works better together. Better together At the end of the day, it’s betterwhen consumer experiences work seamlessly together, it’s better when marketers work together and it’s better when suppliers (platforms, devices and channels) work together. The result is win-win-win marketing: brands win because more of their budget is spent making an impact; publishers and vendors win by increasing the value of their audiences and technologies; and consumers win because they get marketing theyvalue instead of marketing they hate. But the biggest difference between Open Garden and every other omnichannel marketing vision is this: •You own your Open Garden •You manage direct relationshipswithyourcustomers •You take control ofyour data and your partnerships •You actively manage your marketing ecosystem • So you controlyour destiny Tech vendors are eager to help you succeed – but they’re not eager to give you complete ownership and control ofyour ecosystem. Traditional Open Garden Cookie or device-based People-based adtech isolated from martech adtech meets martech Some digital channels All channels, offline and digital Forced partners Choose best-of-breed Closed silos Open connections Anonymity-bound Privacy-compliant Hunch-based Data-driven Opaque Transparent and measurable
- 12. The benefits ofOpen Garden In a snapshot,you can: Unite yourworld - bring together offline and digital; martech and adtech Deliver great customer experiences – with smarter, more relevant, more consistent every-channel engagements Perform better everywhere – maximizing your data leverage for increased acquisition, conversion and lifetime value Understand your audiences better – with closed- loop analytics fed by every interaction, everywhere Controlyour own destiny – uniting your chosen best-of-breed partners and tools around data that you control The bottom line: Creating a seamless customer experience helpsyou growyour business. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 12
- 13. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 13 Open Garden use cases Some ofthe big problems that Open Garden solves Open Garden addresses the most pressing challenges facing every CMO. The most important of these will always be growth and ROI – these are how every CMO is measured and they’re the primary drivers of the Open Garden movement. Other, more specific use cases include: Future-proofing investments • How do I build a plug-and-play architecture that gives me the freedom to work with anyone? • How do I maximize agility instead of closing doors? • How do I keep up with the pace of innovation? Data and technology integration and management • How do I integrate my complex ecosystem efficiently? • How do I simplify myworld to accelerate data activation? • How do I make my applications work together without massive investment? Marketing effectiveness • How can I deliver relevant, personalized marketing at scale? • How can I create seamless customer experiences that people value? • How do I improve my targeting, conversion, retention, loyalty and upsell? Marketing efficiency • How do I best integrate and optimize my offline and digital marketing? How do I make my data, systems, and teams work better together? • How do I maximize the efficiency of my budget and operations? Collaborative marketing and monetization • How do I squeeze the value out of all this data? • How can I best work with my partners to enable collaborative marketing? How do I monetize data in newways? Marketing mix analytics • How do I measure the impact of my marketing programs on real sales? • How do I knowwhich investments are delivering the best results? • How do I build attribution models that reallywork? Data privacy and trust • How do I balance the need to personalize marketing while respecting consumer privacy and maintaining trust? • How do I achieve compliance with all data privacy regulations and ensure the ethical use of data? • How do I share insight without sharing my actual data? These aren’t nice-to-have use cases; they’re the critical imperatives facing every marketing department today.
- 14. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 14 What canyou expect from an Open Garden? Open Garden is a paradigm shift, giving marketers the freedom to assembletheirown ecosystems, the connectivityto deliverrelevance everywhere and the controlto continuously drive increased ROI. Open Garden wasn’t pulled out of thin air, it was built from the solid principles that the most progressive modern marketers already follow: Identity resolution To treat people in a relevant way, you need to recognize them whereveryou interact with them. That’s why resolving identity in every channel in a privacy-compliant way is a core principle of Open Garden.Without it, relevance is left to chance. Deep understanding Open Garden leverages 1st, 2nd and 3rd-party data for the deep understanding that leads to better targeting. That means privacy-compliant data collaboration with your partners. Connectivity The ability to deliveryour audiences to all publishers and platforms is a cornerstone of Open Garden. All the insight in the world can’t help you ifyou can’t connect it to people everywhere. Closed-LoopAnalytics Connect online and offline data to close the loop with the analytics and measurement you need. Trust Trust is the currency of all marketing. Breach it and you’ve lost your right to market. Protecting identities with holistic privacy-compliant practices is an unbendable Open Garden principle. Governance Maximizing the value ofyour data assets with best-practice data hygiene, quality and authentication is just common sense. This stuff is gold. Treat it that way. Not a bad set of principles to build your future on, are they? Open Garden is enabled by next-generation technology An Open Garden leverages a new generation of technologies to deliver unprecedented levels of connectivity, speed and agility, including: Cloud – bringing your data closer to your digital channels Data Lake – Hadoop enabled environment to store and process hyper data Real-time – marketing delivered at the right time Advanced analytics – for scoring, modeling and driving bid strategies Safe Haven processing – for holistic, privacy-compliant governance Next-gen data management tooling – for automated data quality, mastering, data curation and authentication Artificial Intelligence and machine learning – for predictive capabilities and self-improving rule sets In short, this is not your mother’s marketing stack.
- 15. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 15 Open Garden: theAcxiom approach Open Garden is a newblueprint powered bya simplified, integrated ecosystem that turns yourisolated silos into cogs in a well-oiled machine. But trying to bring allthe components and expertise in-house can bevery expensive and time consuming, taking important strategists awayfrom the front line. The right Data Architects can help you design and build your own Open Garden – and even run all or part of it foryou. This is exactlywhat Acxiom Marketing Services does for our clients.
- 16. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 16 Join the Open Garden Open Garden is the way marketing is going: uniting your entire marketing ecosystem at the data layer so you can: Drive the next big leap in revenue – by data- powering your acquisition, conversion, loyalty, cross- and upsell, lookalike modeling and analytics. Uniteyourworld – connecting all channel fragments and silos, offline and online. Collaborate to share data – with anyone who has data that can help you target better and deliver more relevant marketing. Control and activateyour data – managing it like the strategic asset it is and employing it in real time. Deliver relevant, compelling customer engagement everywhere – across all channels, offline and online. Do it all in a privacy-compliantway – accessing insight without compromising consumer trust. Get better all the time – with closed-loop analytics that takes in – and feeds out – data from all channels and touchpoints. Critically, all of this starts from where you are today – you don’t have to ‘rip and replace’ important parts ofyour infrastructure. Instead, you leverage your existing investments and empower them to perform much better. This is big. Open Garden is much more than a tech stack or a strategy. It’s a completely new blueprint for turning a disconnected set of best-of-breed platforms and tools into a unified ecosystem that works better for everyone. You’re more than halfway there right now. Talk to us about completing the journey. The role of DataArchitects As marketing transforms into a highly tech-driven discipline, it has created ever-widening skills gaps. Keeping your operation lean and cost-effective means finding the right balance between in-house talent and outside partners. As Data Architects, Acxiom Marketing Services works closelywith both marketing and IT teams to design, build, manage and monitor marketing ecosystems. For many marketing teams, this is far more cost-effective than building an entire team in-house.
- 17. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 17 Workingwith an Open Garden Partner We architect and buildyour Open Garden A next-generation marketing ecosystem that ingests, enhances, connects, activates, distributes and governs your marketing data. We helpyou manage and optimizeyour marketing data operation To maintain data quality and embrace new channels and partners. We provide neutral, Safe Haven connectivity To share data between you and your partners in a privacy-compliant way. We don’t just bring expertise, we bring powerful technology and rich data to the table. As your Open Garden partner, Acxiom Marketing Services can help you with: • Data strategy and architecture • Data and systems integration • Data measurement and analytics • Data privacy and security Acxiom provides the data foundation for the world’s best marketers.We enable people-based marketing everywhere through a simple, open approach to connecting systems and data that drives seamless customer experiences and higher ROI. A leader in identity and the ethical use of data for more than 45 years, Acxiom helps thousands of clients and partners around the globe work together to create a world where all marketing is relevant.
- 18. The Definitive Guide to Open Gardens 18 For more information, email us at info@acxiom.com, visit OpenGardenNow.com and follow us on Twitter The CMO’s Open Garden Checklist Ifyou can’t check allofthese boxes,you need to begin setting up and building yourOpen Garden today. FF I can easily integrate my existing offline and digital marketing channels. FF I have the freedom to choose best-of-breed partners. FF I can easily integrate new marketing technologies into my stack. FF I have a single view of my customers across channels. FF I can create seamless customer experiences. FF I collaborate with my marketing partners to deliver more relevant marketing. FF I can accurately close the loop on every campaign to knowwhich investments are delivering the best results, and optimize accordingly. FF I can personalize marketing while respecting consumer privacy. FF I am always in compliance with data privacy regulations. FF I can deliver relevant, personalized marketing at scale.