Australia – UM Australia has partnered with MMM provider Mutinex to launch a first-of-its-kind real-time media data integration in Australia.

This initiative automates the data sharing between UM’s systems and Mutinex’s GrowthOS platform, offering significant time savings and improved data accuracy for UM’s clients, starting with foundation client Optus.

Adam Krass, chief digital, data, and tech officer at UM, said, “As we move towards a future dominated by data-driven strategies, this collaboration underscores UM’s commitment to innovation, privacy, and security. The seamless and secure data transfer process aligns with the highest standards of data protection, ensuring client information is handled in compliance with government regulation and leading encryption solutions.”

The media data integration is set to greatly benefit UM’s foundational client Optus by facilitating faster and more precise data-driven decision-making. Automating data transfer enhances efficiency, allowing UM’s team to focus on creativity and strategic growth. Real-time updates improve data accuracy for Optus’ MMM, ensuring better channel optimisation and more frequent tactical reviews. The integration also accelerates decision-making with immediate access to updated data and adheres to strict security standards to protect Optus’ information.

Mutinex and UM’s integration will be extended to other shared clients, with the partnership committed to delivering exceptional value and enhanced marketing and business outcomes.

Commenting on the integration, Mat Baxter, CEO for APAC at Mutinex, shared, “UM and Optus deserve congratulations for pioneering the way media data is supplied for MMM. Let’s be frank: the more fluid the data supply, the more valuable the insight. It’s as simple as that.”

Meanwhile, Cam Luby, head of consumer marketing at Optus, said, “This collaboration marks a significant leap forward in how we leverage data to drive growth and innovation at Optus. By automating the flow of data between UM and Optus technology, we are not just improving our decision-making speed but also elevating the precision and impact of our marketing strategy.” 

USA – Nexxen, a global, flexible advertising technology platform with deep expertise in data and advanced TV, has announced a strategic data partnership with The Trade Desk. This collaboration grants The Trade Desk’s advertisers exclusive access to Nexxen’s automatic content recognition (ACR) data segments, empowering them with enhanced targeting capabilities across multiple platforms.

ACR data, often confined within and fragmented across walled gardens, addresses key challenges in CTV, such as advertising oversaturation and fragmented targeting. Nexxen’s ACR data segments enable advertisers to extend their reach to TV-viewing audiences, control ad frequency, and engage in competitive conquesting effectively.

The integration of Nexxen’s ACR data into The Trade Desk’s platform will provide clients with advanced cross-channel and cross-device targeting capabilities, enabling more efficient media investments across the premium, open internet.

Nexxen’s ACR data segments, covering both linear and streaming TV, will now be available on The Trade Desk’s platform as its first self-service TV data provider in the U.K., Canada, the U.S., and Australia. These segments, categorised by genre, networks, programs, and brand-level ad exposure, deliver a more comprehensive and holistic view of TV-viewing data.

Karim Rayes, chief product officer at Nexxen, said, “We’ve long understood and appreciated the ways in which ACR data can empower advertisers to better understand their audiences’ TV viewership patterns and inform their cross-platform investments. Ultimately, we want to ensure these advertisers have access to the richest, most relevant data available and the flexibility to activate that data across the premium, open internet—which is exactly what this partnership with The Trade Desk brings to market.” 

Josif Zanich, managing director for JAPAC at Nexxen, added, “Historically, advertisers across Australia have struggled to tap into the breadth of ACR data programmatically, challenged by limited choice and variety. Our strategic partnership with The Trade Desk is changing that narrative, enabling more advertisers to reach the right audiences, particularly across CTV.”

Meanwhile, Ben Sylvan, VP of data partnerships at The Trade Desk, commented, “Brands need to think about TV media buying in a holistic manner that combines both their linear and CTV plans. Nexxen’s ACR data can empower advertisers to better understand their audience across platforms and devices, so they can aim to efficiently invest their media budgets to provide consumers with a premium ad experience.”

Isabella Spragg, director of data partnerships for ANZ at The Trade Desk, also shared, “Broadcast TV is fragmenting faster than expected, making it harder to manage campaigns across both linear and digital channels. We’re thrilled to welcome Nexxen to our ACR audience marketplace. This partnership will offer unparalleled scale and reliability in cross-screen strategies, especially as marketers face growing pressure to justify their investment decisions.”

Singapore – With social restrictions gradually easing down and the world slowly returning to normal, we are now realising the full potential of the phygital world: a space that brings a combination of digital and physical experiences. From SMEs and institutions to large enterprises, this blended experience is being incorporated into their day-to-day operations because of its numerous advantages.

The year 2022 saw the marketing industry flourishing in more ways than one. This includes the rise of influencer and content marketing, the continuous boom of the e-commerce space, and the metaverse getting more known in the digital world, amongst others. But amidst this upward trajectory, there are still challenges that the marketing industry will face and will have to overcome now that hybrid marketing strategies are in place. 

MARKETECH APAC, in its quest to share key trends, insights, and relevant predictions for the preparation of the marketing community for 2023, has brought back its future-oriented industry series – but now much broader and larger to give the community a 360-degree view of what to expect in the coming year. ‘What’s NEXT 2023’ now comprises of four main pillars – article, interview, webinar, and conference –  and to kick the series off, the digital media starts with the launch of its thought leadership article series. 

The article leg of the industry series features the views, predictions, and some tips from various marketing leaders across APAC on different industry-relevant topics for 2023 and beyond. This includes exclusive written insights on integrated campaigns, personalisation, and B2B marketing, amongst others. 

Part of the series is Andrea Chuang, head of marketing for Malaysia-based used car platform myTukar, who will be discussing the importance of integrated campaigns and things to consider in doing these campaigns; and Jan Harling, director of new customer acquisition for APAC at foodpanda, who will be sharing his knowledge about personalised marketing and what brands need to know about their consumers. He will also be providing tips on how media and creatives can work together for their personalisation initiatives, and how to target consumers in a world that’s becoming less targetable.

Check out the initial line-up of published insights by marketing leaders under the series:

Kick-starting the article series, Amperity’s Area Vice President Billy Loizou explained the consequences of having fragmented customer data for businesses. He also enumerated three reasons why a great identity resolution strategy is a must-have for brands.

Click here to read the full article.

In this insightful read, James Campbell, regional manager of SnapLogic for ANZ, stressed why it is important to incorporate intelligent practices into companies’ data integration, how vital it is to leverage modern technology, and how automation helps enterprises deliver and achieve their goals, amongst other things. 

Click here to read the full article.

With tech companies and governing bodies making stronger restrictions when it comes to data privacy, businesses might find it harder to access customer data. In this article, Billy Loizou, area vice president of Amperity, shares how you can empower your business despite the stricter privacy rules, unlock the value of customer data to drive growth, and use ‘messy’ data to make the year 2023 for your business a success.

Click here to read the full article.

At present, B2B marketers still believe that they should always talk about how ‘good’ their products and services are. Donovan Chee, head of marketing and communications for SEA at Bureau Veritas says that marketers don’t have to do this, and instead learn to understand their customers and “win their hearts and minds,” amongst other tips.

Click here to read the full article.

The fifth installment of this series features Negar Mokhtarnia, director of product at Australian retail brand Pet Circle, weighing the importance of focusing on customer lifetime value over customer acquisition for e-commerce companies. She also shared her own take on leveraging data to boost brands’ customer experience and establishing a relational e-commerce experience to ensure sustainable growth.

Click here to read the full article.

Consumers today expect brands to be more vocal about social movements and contentious topics, which puts the responsibility to brands being an advent of change. In this article, Aaron Brooks, co-founder of influencer marketing platform Vamp, gives his insights on purpose-driven marketing, why it is important, the value of authenticity, its four key elements, and some advice for brands looking to leverage this approach.

Click here to read the full article.

Conventional business knowledge implies that sales and marketing should be tied together to drive profit and define a brand’s success. In this piece, Mark Opao, communications planning partner at Kaspersky for APAC explains why the two are hard to fuse and exposes the underlying realities of marrying Brand Building and Sales Promotion.

Click here to read the full article.

In the post-pandemic era, we just might see economic environments and market situations evolving. So, how can companies leverage these evolutions? Hongchia How, vice president of Appier for APAC answers this question by enumerating three MarTech strategies that can help companies seize great business opportunities and make smarter business decisions.

Click here to read the full article.

Asia-Pacific’s share of the global connected cars market reached 42% in 2020, and is anticipated to register a CAGR of more than 19% in the coming years. But how can this drive the growth of media tech platforms? Sharon Soh, chief planning and audience officer at UM APAC shares with us how, as well as its impact on brands and marketers in this thought-leadership piece.

Click here to read the full article.

As data and measurement becomes a cross-functional effort with marketing research and technology teammates – how can marketing lead the way in being more agile and achieving more success? Anna Henwood, CEO of Stickybeak shares how creating a mindset of experimentation and team collaboration – with your customer deciding if your hypothesis is right.

Click here to read the full article.

With many companies investing in customer data platforms and data agency partners, the real question is how marketers can make the most out of it? Antony Yiu, chief executive officer at PHD Hong Kong explains the process on how marketers can make their first-party data ‘dance’ in harmony and bring impactful revenue to someone’s business.

Click here to read the full article.

In an era of increasingly targeted marketing and limited budgets, how can brands effectively reduce wastage and improve performance by ensuring that their ads reach the right audience? This is the question that Jan Harling, chief executive officer at Virtus Asia Consulting asks in this latest article, centered around the topic of personalised marketing.

Click here to read the full article.

Watch this space as we update this article with details and links for other What’s NEXT 2023 thought-leadership articles.

If you are a marketing leader and would like to share your insights and predictions under the series, email us at [email protected].

Enterprises are creating billions of rows, articles and pieces of data every minute of every day. With multitudes of applications and information sources all creating mountains of data, ensuring the data is managed and delivered to the right team at the right time can be overwhelming. 

As organisations look to building resilience in 2023, they must find better and simpler ways to access and analyse their data efficiently – doing so is key to making better data-driven decisions and winning in a saturated market. 

In the recent ‘Demystifying Data Integration: Automation Hacks Every IT Professional Should Know’ webinar hosted by SnapLogic, a leader in intelligent integration and enterprise automation; SnapLogic industry experts Jeremiah Stone, chief technology officer, and David Wilmer, principal product marketing manager, broke how enterprise automation makes organisations more competitive in today’s cut-throat landscape.

Data integration is more critical than ever

Data integration is critical to the success of organisations today. And yet, according to recent SnapLogic research in partnership with Vanson Bourne, 83% of ITDMs (IT decision-makers) are not completely satisfied with the performance and output of their data management and data warehousing solutions. This dissatisfaction stems from issues relating to data formatting, regulations and speed of data movement and accessibility within the organisation.

“Organisations know that integrated data instils data trust and that trust is critical in basing important business decisions on analytics,” Wilmer says. “But regardless of data integration’s importance, many organisations are still finding it difficult.”

On average, enterprises have approximately 254 applications, 40-60 tools per team and more than half (56%) of SaaS applications are not owned or managed by a company IT department. As app sprawl increases, data from each app gets siloed and becomes inaccessible to other parts of the organisations, teams and apps.

According to the same SnapLogic research, more than half (53%) of respondents say they do not entirely trust their data for decision-making. Wilmer says this isn’t surprising, considering the number of disconnected data sources organisations typically have.

“At the same time, 40% don’t completely trust their data for decision-making because poor integration means data is missing or incomplete,” he points out. “Disparate data sources increase data silos. That means your data can’t flow between systems, which lowers the confidence in data.”

No data integration means no data insights, which leads to impaired decision-making – it’s an equation that adds up to adverse business outcomes and poor user experience. In fact, the average organisation reports losing more than AU$1.45m each year due to poor data management. To remedy this and leverage the power of SaaS, data must be integrated.

Tip to streamline and simplify 

Leveraging modern tools and technology is the ultimate hack organisations can implement to streamline and simplify complex integration processes. The first way to do this is by eliminating manual coding. 

“Manual coding is tedious,” Wilmer says. “It’s prone to errors. It requires specialised skills. So you want to look for a modern platform that provides low/no code solutions.”

Low/no code solutions benefit entire organisations because they can be used by everyone, regardless of profession. These easy-to-use solutions empower staff to solve complex problems without relying on IT engineers to make sense of the data first.

“Everyone from tech-savvy engineers to business-savvy analysts needs to have access to data when and where they need it,” Wilmer stresses. “It should no longer be the bottleneck to business success.”

Stone agrees, adding that while he loves expressive development, code-centric integrations reduce the accessibility of the business rules that are codified into those integrations. 

“Organisations reap tonnes of benefits by taking a visual, no/low code approach to integration,” Stone explains. “For one, it’s accessible to people with business knowledge. But also, customer after customer that I’ve worked with finds that it reduces the risk of management and maintenance of those integrations because they’re actually easier to hand off between team members.

“Integration is a clever way to solve a difficult, persistent problem,” he continues. “The combination of seeing how you can empower different skill sets to participate in the integration process and using a model-driven or visual way to create, support, and maintain the integration is a powerful approach to solving any problem.”

Another way to simplify the complex is to focus on event-driven circumstances. Wilmer says there’s still a time and place for ‘bulk and batch’ processing, but an agile business needs real-time insights, which can only be achieved through streaming and API event-based data movement. “Modern applications need to be connected to share data,” he explains. “Event-driven data sharing powers enterprise automation.”

Beyond that, it’s important to scale with the cloud. “Obviously, when batch and high-volume process is necessary — and it will be — we want to scale with the cloud,” Wilmer adds. “Cloud computing has brought a seemingly limitless ability to reach peak performance and data processing.

“A data integration platform cannot be the bottleneck to achieving this agility. Look for a data platform that is born on the cloud and has the same ability to automatically scale with the cloud to maintain the desired performance.”

Finally, when it comes to simplification, think: consolidating integration. “It shouldn’t take four separate tools that specialise in only one or two methods of data integration to achieve business goals and objectives,” Wilmer insists. “Look for a complete integration platform that can do all four simultaneously to achieve integration, application integration, API management and governance.”

Winning with intelligent integration and automation

The enterprises that will win in the data economy are those that can harness data from every source and turn it into powerful insights. With data as the driving force of the future, it’s imperative to have an integration platform that can seamlessly integrate, automate and mobilise data to any data warehouse with a simple, powerful solution.

Successful integration leads to positive business outcomes and desirable user experiences. That’s why data-driven organisations integrate data to build a single source of truth. “This takes blending operational data with historical data, which involves data warehousing, capturing real-time data and streamlining data for analytics — all things that deliver immediate and tailored customer experiences,” Wilmer says. 

“The more automated this becomes, the quicker you can achieve these outcomes. Enterprise automation drives efficiencies in technology, so you can deliver the goals and promises of your business.”

Stone adds, “Think of it this way, everyone always wants to eat the ice cream first. But you have to eat your broccoli first. Integration is like eating your broccoli to get strong and get those payoffs and benefits.”

SnapLogic is an intelligent integration platform that enables enterprise integration and automation. “With SnapLogic, you will accelerate the value of your data through ease of use and intelligent designs,” Wilmer says.

“SnapLogic simplifies your integration in the cloud by mobilising the data and automating the processes that drive your business, enabling you to achieve enterprise integration and automation in a single platform — one that is purpose-built for the cloud and works with any cloud platform.”

Having that ability and the agility to pivot with technology and respond to challenges swiftly gives enterprises a leg up on the competition — competition that is scrambling to connect, reconfigure and rebuild their data integration processes.

Watch the full, on-demand webinar here.

James Campbell

This article is written by James Campbell, regional manager of SnapLogic for ANZ.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series.