By Johnnie Campbell. Social Planner

Marketo and Adara:

Day 2 kicked off with a trip to Marketo and Adara. Back to back these companies offered a fairly salesy approach, similar to our experiences at Facebook and LinkedIn. Marketo and WebSand again seems like marketing platforms aimed more at marketers within an SME rather than an agency itself. Nonetheless, Marketo offered an interesting example of long-term data marketing using their client Havard University. Havard have a fairly illustrious string on alumni that generally go on to be fairly affluent benefactors of the university itself. Using Marketo they’re keeping track of their alumni, not just in terms of their current financial status, but also what they’re doing online. They’re able to serve specific ads to these alumni and therefore have seen a significant increase in ROI because of this system. An interesting take, but perhaps not relevant to all industries.

Adara were the only non-platform to talk on the second day. They are a data company offering travel data from airlines to a range of different industries. At first I was skeptical about how travel data could be used across different industry, but after more inquisition it seemed quite effective. Firstly, they busted a few travel myths:

“Myth: Travellers book air first, then hotel, then car.

 Fact: 72% of business travels, and 70% of leisure travellers book their hotel on the same day as they book their flight. Meaning a huge opportunity for the hotel industry to use real-time marketing.”

 The reason I found this compelling was actually how it could be transferred into other industries though. For example, our client Glenfiddich could benefit from targeting high net-worth individuals flying to Beijing, by advertising our premium range of Glenfiddich aged single malts at Beijing airport duty-free stores. We could target users as their booking their flight / hotel, or even through retargeting as they arrive and switch on their mobile in Beijing.

Quantcast & Yahoo:

I’ll start with Yahoo. We saw a very run of the mill deck from Yahoo about their global relevance, claiming to be the 3rd biggest site on the internet today…interesting. However, I was really looking for an update on Tumblr, and what they planned to do to monetize it / any future releases they could update us on. Rather than talk directly about plans to monetise the platform (which they do intend to do by the way) they shared with us a fantastic example of how they’re working with agencies currently. This example came I the form of a Tumble site build for Nebraska, a film released earlier this year:

This showed an extremely creative example of how ‘brands’ can use Tumblr (and pay Tumblr) to create fully social websites. Every image and quote from the film was treated as a separate post, so users could share and ‘like’ each one separately, whilst the whole experience acted as through it were a normal site build. Definitely one for us to consider in future, and a very creative use of the platform.

Quantcast were interesting in many respects, and we actually implemented Quantcast analytics on one of clients websites last year without fully knowing the ad offering that came with it. Quantcast analytics proposed to be able to offer accurate competitor site tracking – much like Alexa.com, but with actual accuracy. Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to use this as our competitors sites aren’t on Quantcast’s radar. However I’m sure for more general industries, this can be extremely useful.

Their ad tool leaned towards inbound marketing interestingly enough, and the benefits of measuring every step of the purchase funnel from awareness to last click. Quantcast are offering data tagging at the early stages of the purchase funnel and are accurately able to attribute sales back to these initial ‘awareness’ driving adverts…perfect for industry with a longer path to purchase, as many of our clients have. They used an interesting analogy to get across this concept:

Meet Konrad. Konrad is a nightclub promoter in Faliraki for one of the island’s most successful clubs…Club Stratos.









Konrad’s job is to flyer for the club, giving out drink deals for those who redeem the flyer when they get inside. He gets commission on the amount of Konard-labelled flyer that are redeemed inside.

Konrad is told to flyer on the beach, to raise awareness for anyone thinking of going out, but doesn’t have a defined idea of which club they want to visit:


Flyering on the beach is hard word. Konrad sees about 5 conversions to ever 100 flyers he hands out. So he has a great idea:


If he stands outside the club, giving out flyers to people outside, he sees his conversion rate go up to 50. However, for the club, this isn’t effective marketing, as those waiting outside were probably likely to come in anyway…without a flyer…paying top dollar for their drinks inside. So Konrad loses his job.

The ‘moral’ of the story is that attribution needs to occur all the way from the beach to the club. They could set up a different offer outside the club to entice people inside, but people like Konrad on the beach, raising awareness at that stage of the funnel, need to be attributed to the final sale.

It’s a bit twee, but I think it’s a helpful analogy for explaining data’s role in digital marketing.

And that wrapped up my visit to Dublin!