Knowing your consumer beyond the pixel: How Xaxis is bridging online & offline data to deliver outcomes

It’s no question that data is growing at an unprecedented pace, and the increasing amount of consumer data in particular is fundamentally changing how brands operate in the region. Despite the imminent cookieless future, advancements in contextual targeting, increasing adoption of consented consumer data such as Consumer Data Platforms and Consumer Panels, and growth in 1^st party data give advertisers a great view of their consumers in the online environment. Companies are also becoming more equipped with technologies that can provide marketers with consumer data in the offline environment, such as geofencing, beacons and point-of-sale (POS) systems.
However, while brands have ever increasing rich data coming from both the online and offline lives of consumers, this data currently sits in silos with no bridge to synergize them. This siloed data results in siloed media planning for online and offline campaigns, with no influence coming from one another’s data. Econsultancy found that only 23 percent of marketers in Southeast Asia believe their current solutions are excellent at providing data integration and a unified view across all channels.

Impacts of Siloed Online & Offline Data A brand’s inability to bridge their online & offline data negatively impacts the brand’s ability to: Intelligently activate omnichannel Have holistic creative considerations Leverage media consumption nuances Deliver relevancy at scale All of which is to the ultimate detriment of a marketer’s desired return on media investment, caused by gaps in audience understanding and attribution between online and offline worlds.

In today’s omnichannel world, marketers can’t afford such disunity in their understanding of the consumer. This is especially true with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the already complex path to purchase has evolved even further, setting the scene for unpredictable long-term changes in consumer behavior that we must be prepared to address. For advertisers to remain accountable and most effectively drive business outcomes with their media spend in a post-COVID world, it is imperative to bridge the gap between online and offline data to gain access to a 360-degree view of the consumer across the entire journey.
Silo-Based Media Planning and The Two-Dimensional Consumer
Media spend for both online and select offline channels is still going strong across Asia Pacific. The online share of ad spend is anticipated to grow +550% by 2023, and while less spend is going to traditional offline media channels as a whole, these traditional channels still continue to make up a substantial portion of advertising budgets. Out-Of-Home in particular is still going strong in the region, having grown +19% in 2019.
In planning for these campaigns, brands are of course using the aforementioned rich data for both their online and offline consumers to inform their segmentation and targeting. The issue is that both of these data sets live in isolation from one another, and media planning teams are unable to use online data to influence offline media planning and measurement, and vice versa.