Fixing mobile marketing’s 90% analysis, 10% action problem

What do marketers do all day?

“Most marketers that I know today spend 90% of their time doing reports …  and 10% actually thinking about their campaigns,” says Adam Jaffe, CMO of ABA English. “I want to reverse that.”

Jaffe is highlighting the single most onerous problem in digital marketing today: Excel hell and dashboard damnation. It’s resulting in millions of marketers spending more time finding, cleaning, and presenting data on their activities than actually acting. It’s turning creative advertisers into by-the-numbers accountants. And it’s absolutely killing productivity.

Which is exactly why TUNE just launched Multiverse.

Mobile marketers, just like football players or baseball fans, need to know the score. They need to know if they are winning or losing … if they’re making money or just spending it. Paradoxically, in our complex and high-tech world of advertising, that’s harder than ever before.

Jaffe alone has to deal with 15-20 dashboards, multiple Excel spreadsheets, and data from all the publishers he works with just to get a hopefully-accurate picture of how much he’s spending and what results his team’s marketing is achieving.

“I have to bring all that stuff together … it’s a nightmare,” he says.

Peter Hamilton, TUNE CEO, agrees:

“Marketers spend a lot of time swimming in spreadsheets, exporting from maybe 50 or even 100 different advertising partners, combining that into one Excel spreadsheet, pulling in all their mobile engagement data and attribution data,” he told The Drum. “They’re trying to normalize that data, and all that data’s done on different time zones. The columns are sorted and ordered in different ways, so trying to get down to the accurate and granular result is really, really difficult.”

Multiverse is TUNE’s answer. It aggregates all of your data from Facebook, Google, Twitter, Opera, and over 100 other digital advertising partners in one place. Deterministically. Accurately. Simply. And, of course, all normalized, so you’re no longer comparing apples to oranges, and bicycles to fish.

The challenge that Jaffe highlights is accuracy (as you can see in the video above). Accuracy is critical, because decisions based on bad data are typically … bad. That’s why it’s critical that TUNE is an attribution platform that is used to dealing with big deterministic data, not just small amounts of aggregated probabilistic data.

What’s the difference?

“Every marketer wants to be confident in their data and reporting to make the right marketing decisions,” says TUNE’s VP of Marketing, Jennifer Wong. “We integrate all the data into one place and line it up with the attribution and engagement from that channel. Logging into to multiple systems, which use different columns of data, only allows you to do probabilistic matching on ad spend. Now with Multiverse, marketers are able to see the direct results from all their partners, in one view.”

Marketers’ holy grail has long been the right message to the right person at the right time.

Now, with the right data from the right sources instantly at their fingertips all the time, they have the opportunity to invest the time and energy to actually make that happen. And switch from 90% analysis, 10% action to where they really want to be: 10% analysis, 90% action.

Multiverse is available now in public beta. And, it is completely free, no matter which attribution partner you use.