Disrupting Adtech
The biggest waste in digital advertising is happening because of wrong acquisition and reacquisition. About half of the newly acquired customers had no reason to be acquired – either they scooted right away or they should have been reactivated because they were already customers once. This is the $200B AdWaste that I have written about multiple times. [See Martech 2.0 and Web3: Solving Advertising’s 50% Problem and Solving the $200 Billion AdWaste Problem.] And where is waste, there is wealth – for entrepreneurs who can solve the problem. Adtech is an industry that is waiting to be reset. Bing’s possible success with GPT in search will only shift the ad dollars; the need of the hour is for the industry to shrink. The $200 billion is coming from the profits of brands and higher prices that consumers end up paying for products and services. This is the reset the global adtech industry needs. How can this happen?
The starting point has to be to first understand why this additional spending is happening and what is the intervention that is needed to create the wedge for innovations to make an impact. I explained the problem in my recent ProfitXL essay: “Marketers spend money acquiring customers, and then hope to monetise them on their properties (website and app). This is easier said than done because unless marketers are able to imprint their brand on the consumers subconscious, they face a continuous battle to bring them back for transactions. This is done through a process called engagement: messages pushed to our already flooded inboxes, along with nudges and recommendations when consumers clickthrough. The problem is that as consumers we are numb to all these exhortations and ignore the incoming offers. This “attention recession” has serious consequences for marketers – because if we don’t open and act on their emails, SMSes, and push notifications, they have little choice but to retarget us on the Badtech auction platforms spending even more money to reactivate their relationship with us.”
This is where the All-in-Email solution comes in. By eliminating the (at times, interminable) wait for consumers, marketers can push the conversation, conversion and commerce funnels close to the user. The magic of interactivity and incentives in the inbox is something consumers have not experienced before. The convenience and excitement will help increase engagement by magnitudes. And as existing customers engage and buy more, brands will need to spend less on the adtech platforms acquiring new ones. All-in-Email (with WhatsApp in some countries) can “convert the unidirectional push channels into two-way rich interactive hotlines, thus finally enabling marketers to bridge the chasm between new customer acquisition and attracting traffic to their properties. Hotlines are thus the gateways to building deep and lasting relationships, a win-win for both brands and customers.”
