By Melanie Hoptman, managing director, Asia Pacific at LiveRamp
In today’s fragmented media landscape, Australian marketers face unprecedented challenges in executing effective marketing campaigns. Tightening budgets, fragmented audiences, signal loss, and data fragmentation – to name just a few factors – are combining to create significant hurdles for marketers.
As the Australian advertising ecosystem transforms with the rise of retail media networks (RMNs), connected TV (CTV), and emerging platforms, managing campaigns across these diverse channels has become increasingly complex.
Marketers must now adapt their strategies to reach consumers across an ever-expanding array of touchpoints to drive growth for their business.
In my view, there are four key obstacles confronting Australian marketers today. However, with the right data-driven approach, marketers can overcome these challenges to drive the omnichannel experience consumers want and achieve cross-channel marketing success.
Bringing privacy to the forefront
While it’s tempting to oversimplify this by blaming data privacy regulations, the reality is it’s bigger than regulators. Consumers want privacy and are more sophisticated about it than ever before, which is part of the driving pressures on regulations, but also on major tech companies and browsers. Companies must find ways to market to consumers that respect their privacy while also providing the engaging, relevant experiences that they demand.
Solution: Navigating this new privacy-centric world requires robust first-party data strategies. Brands need to focus on building direct relationships with consumers, thereby enabling continued exchanges of experiences and services in exchange for deeper information about the consumers. Once first-party data strategies have been established, brands can build from there to enhance their first-party data, including by leveraging data collaboration and privacy-enhancing technologies like data clean rooms, to continue building and refining their customer intelligence in ways that drive value for all parties.
Breaking down data silos
A critical part of developing a successful first-party data strategy is breaking down silos between different parts of a company, in order to enable a unified view of the consumer. This helps companies to understand all touchpoints with a consumer, enabling better insight into their journey, and powering better personalisation and engagement.
Beyond a company’s walls, using data collaboration to break down data silos across all of the platforms that a consumer’s journey may encompass – like retail point of sale, or consuming ads across different types of publishers – helps provide further insight into the consumer’s journey, and can even help with issues like new product development.
Solution: As brands develop first-party data strategies, they can select identity solutions that can help to unify customer data across all channels and all parts of the company. Furthermore, identity helps to serve as a basis for data collaboration, enabling better connectivity for brand marketers to activate across the ecosystem, as well as a basis for solutions like clean rooms, to help ensure more accurate privacy-conscious matching that can drive better insights, and also improve marketing outcomes.
Overcoming fragmentation across all channels
More than ever before, Aussie consumers are spending their time across an unprecedented number of media channels. Every channel operates differently, with unique requirements, capabilities, and data structures, making it difficult for advertisers to manage and optimise campaigns across the entire spectrum. Fragmentation affects campaigns in different ways across the length of campaign lifecycles: before campaigns begin, marketers need to understand where their audiences are spending their time, in order to understand where to best target their investments; during campaigns, consumers may be getting overexposed to ads, or budgets may be getting spent in less effective ways; after campaigns end, companies need to determine whether strategies were effective, and how their campaigns influenced conversions and other business outcomes.
Solution: Data collaboration is key here, helping to break down barriers across publishers and with retailers and other critical points of the consumer journey. Through clean rooms and other data collaboration tools, marketers can gain needed visibility into what destinations consumers are engaging with campaigns on; more timely insights into how campaigns are performing, enabling quick adjustments and helping to maximise returns on investments; following campaigns, better cross-channel measurement to determine the best performance, as well as connecting exposures to real business outcomes like conversions and sales.
Combating ad fatigue through personalisation
Ad fatigue and increased competition have led to diminishing returns on traditional advertising investments. Next&Co’s quarterly Digital media wastage report showed that Australian advertisers wasted a whopping $123.1 million in digital advertising in Q2 of 2024. Critically, even if brands take the right steps in every other part of the marketing journey, consumers’ ad fatigue is a critical obstacle that can affect whether campaigns succeed or fail.
Solution: The solution here is all about engagement and brands and marketers need to deliver on greater personalisation and creativity. But creativity alone isn’t enough. Personalisation, powered by first-party data and omnichannel content optimisation, can significantly enhance ad relevance. By delivering tailored messages to the right audience at the right moment, brands can not only capture attention but also inspire action—boosting both engagement and ROI, in an increasingly competitive landscape.
The Way Forward in Cross-Channel Marketing
Mastering cross-channel marketing in today’s complex landscape requires a strategic approach that addresses each of these challenges head-on.
To stay ahead, marketers need to invest in robust data strategies, embrace unified views of their customers, improve connectivity and measurement, and continue to push personalisation. By embracing these strategies, Australian marketers can overcome today’s challenges and create impactful, results-driven campaigns that deliver on ROI and drive business success.
Critically, these solutions power omnichannel marketing, which addresses the cross-channel issues that marketers face while helping them to understand individual consumers’ journeys across every brand touchpoint
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Top image: Melanie Hoptman