There is no doubt that the digital marketing industry, which has allowed me to develop professionally for so many years, has been transformed several times, but never as deeply as with the introduction of technology (Adtech) in almost all aspects of campaign operation. advertising.
As always, technology advances faster than companies and users. Therefore, the impressive growth of programmatic marketing in our region has created new functions and needs.
If for some reason, you seek to offer services to companies in marketing and your goal is to have high demand and little competition, here I list some needs that are not yet covered or that do not have enough offer in the market.
1.- Education and certification
There is little offer of (good) digital marketing courses and above all, programmatic marketing, which give tools applicable to a job within an agency, publisher, brand, trading desk, technology company, etc. Normally they are knowledge obtained by being in one of these positions, which makes it slow and incomplete.
It would be very beneficial to have companies that train and certify people to act as traders, data experts, supply management, program strategists, etc. And that they make sure that they have direct contact in the different platforms of the main technology companies
2.- Specialized headhunters
Regarding the first point, the industry suffers from lack of talent to cover the different positions that are needed. Not a week goes by without someone asking me for contacts and recommendations from people to hire. Traditional headhunters are usually not sufficiently involved in the industry, to attract ideal candidates to companies.
Properly cover education and certification, it would serve as a hotbed for these positions, including entry level ones.
3.- Personal Identifiable Information (PII)
The marriage between the Martech (CRM, ERP) and the Adtech (DSP, DMP, SSP) is one of the most important advances in the advertising world. The ability to have all points of contact, inventories, sales, etc., in real time, of a company with its advertising campaign can give an important growth in the results.
To achieve this, you need the ability to convert personal data (for example, those of a person making a purchase at a branch) into anonymous data to transfer them to media activation platforms, maintaining confidentiality.
In developed countries, there are companies that are dedicated to providing the service of anonymizing, making individual identification (knowing that it is the same person in the same points of contact) and increasing the user’s knowledge, relating additional data.
In Latin America, this service is not yet developed and companies dedicated to this have no immediate plans to enter these countries. Surely a company that can cover this function, would have a lot of local demand.
4.- Entreprise selling
I have spent many years managing commercial teams for the digital industry. Most of them are focused on making the sale in the world of “traditional” digital marketing. Sell by campaign, sell by property, sell by rebates, sell by personal relationships.
Now that the marketing world has been technified, what is needed is a sales model that looks more like the models of technology companies such as IBM, Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, etc. It is a much more technical sale and with consulting approach.
If you are a person who has the technical knowledge of programmatic world and accounts with commercial skills, surely there will be many companies that require your services.
5.- Transactional segmentation
There are companies that sell data segments of all kinds, having literally hundreds of thousands of segments to offer, ranging from something general such as sex and age to more specific ones such as people who go to super and buy canned soups.
A good part of these segments are based on “weak” behaviors. For example, that they read a type of information or that they “like” a product. Companies that dedicate themselves to offering “strong” behaviors will have a great advantage over others.
“Strong” behaviors are usually transactional. For example, for a segment of “travelers” a weak segment are those who read an article about a tourist destination; On the other hand, a strong behavior is that of a person who buys plane tickets or hotel nights (transactional events).
6.- Attribution
Attribution, besides being a technically complex issue, is not yet properly covered in Latam. In this region, we settle for the attribution of last click, which usually makes us make wrong decisions for advertising investment.
Companies like Convertro, Visual IQ or Bizible have no presence or local support for a brand or agency to take advantage of the benefits they offer. Any person or company that can offer the sale, installation, operation and support of these tools will automatically have a market with high demand and little competition.
Also published on Medium.