My Predictions for 2023

Larry wrote this blog while CEO of Rise, but his tips still resonate today.  
‍____________________

Each of the past few years has brought marketers and leaders a new set of challenges, from navigating a pandemic to facing new (and much-needed) requirements for privacy-compliant marketing.

I've been listening closely to what I think the marketing industry and consumer behavior tell us will be important in the coming years. For my 2023 predictions, I'm sharing three focus areas where I'm placing my bets and investing our agency's resources to develop new solutions that meet the demands of tomorrow's marketers. If I can help our clients and Rise move forward by innovating and developing expertise in the following three disciplines, I'm confident that success will follow.

‍1. Embrace automation.

Advertising platforms continue to show us that greater automation is coming. In 2022, I detailed my analysis of the top 5 takeaways Google itself reported from Google Marketing Live, which support the idea that automation in ad optimization is the way of the future. Meta is on the same path, launching Advantage+ shopping campaigns that eliminate manual ad creation steps and can test up to 150 different creative combinations at once. In the not-too-distant future, automated campaign optimizations will no longer be one of many options for marketers: we will be required to use the machine learning technology of these major players.

That's why, at Rise, we prioritize aggressive testing of all campaign automation capabilities as they're implemented. We learn what works and what doesn't while we still have other performance tools we can use. But the automation strategy doesn't end there. True multi-channel optimization requires testing platform automation capabilities side-by-side to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each and applying learnings from one automation tool to another so they can complement each other. This elevated view of automation strategy is a priority focus for Rise's media strategy and innovation teams in 2023.

‍2. Master automation data.

Becoming familiar with campaign setup and the mechanics of automated bidding and optimization is just the first step. Equally important is having a strategy for providing machine learning and automation technology with the most valuable data available. This data includes everything from eye-catching creative to offline data like customer lifetime value or converted leads.

Marketers should remember: their competitors use the exact same ad engines, which have access to the same basic data to inform algorithmic decision-making. What will differentiate performance between two brands competing for the same customers is the quality of the creative assets they can supply to the platforms, their ability to feed their offline "secret sauce" data into the bidding engine, and the relevance of their landing pages and the experience customers have with the brand once they arrive at their respective websites.

‍3. Empower our team for the future.

To have a superior focus on managing automation inputs, we also need an updated talent mix. In 2023, we will focus on building new solutions that enable our customers to manage those inputs: create and manage higher-quality creative at scale, transform and design customer data so ad engines can use it, and create world-class websites that foster positive relationships between brands and their customers.

This means we not only need talented creative colleagues, but we must also combine them with technology solutions that allow us to create and test messages at scale. Being at the forefront of advertising and marketing technology testing has always been in Rise's DNA, and now, as a Quad company, we have expanded the solutions we can offer by leveraging Quad's proprietary content management technology and global content production capabilities.

As brands analyze their strategies for creating content at scale, there are smart technology solutions that can accelerate creative performance. For example, in 2022, Rise piloted campaigns with Marpipe, a creative optimization technology for social media. Using a single ad concept, we tested 24 image and layout variations in just seven days to find the best-performing combination, which generated revenue at half the cost per buy of the worst-performing combination. We will continue testing creative technology solutions to create and measure content at scale in 2023.

The example above illustrates how a social marketer's skill set must evolve. And even deeper technical skills are needed to maximize the value of brands' "secret sauce" data across all advertising platforms, including data sources such as consented first-party data to target known customers with relevant messaging or offline conversion data to inform smarter ad-based spend allocations that drive business results. The importance of technical skills cannot be underestimated, as I postulated in my most-read Late Night with Larry: The Next Era of the CMO is Here: Are You Ready For It?

I'm committed to setting Risers and our clients up for success in 2023 by advancing each of these areas. It's going to be an exciting year filled with testing, learning, and, of course, data. Are you motivated to move forward on your marketing roadmap for the future? Let's Talk.