According to an IBM study published in October, 67% of IT and business professionals worldwide indicated that predictive modeling was among their company’s analytic capabilities. Unfortunately for marketers, Big Data and predictive analytics aren’t the omniscience-bearing technologies we’d hoped for. Consumers have steadily increased time spent with various media types and devices, and while the resulting behavioral, transactional and social information is a gold mine for marketers, it’s all for naught unless they’re able to make sense of it.

Turning information into actionable insight remains one of the industry’s highest hurdles, with the proliferation of new marketing channels and platforms making for a tricky attribution-to-action scenario. At least 82% of US brand marketers and agencies are concerned with their ability to integrate cross-channel data—and 96% aren’t completely satisfied with their ability to understand and drive ROI from big data—leading me to believe that marketers need to refine their approach to procure the most relevant and valuable information.

“What” is not as important as “Why”

Marketers’ superficial application of predictive analytics for personalization is reminiscent of the features found on Amazon and Netflix, using customer data to influence their behavior and advance them toward a specific action like making a purchase, downloading a white paper, or filling out a form. The beauty of massive customer data sets is that with enough historical information, predicting a user’s future action propensity becomes much easier. Relational databases that store and manage petabytes of data can tell us what our customers like and, consequently, what else they might like, but not why our customers like certain products or brands.

While digital disruption fragments attribution and plays a role in disjointing our view of the buyer’s journey, it also brings us closer to discovering the manner in which buyers’ innate beliefs and preferences—established long before initial contact with your company or product—affect their buying paths and choices today and beyond.

Integration with the digital world is underway; we no longer exist in a purely physical world. Similarly, our customers live online, on their devices, across social platforms and in CRM systems, providing data junkies with a deluge of information. By tying customer retention and affinity metrics, as well as social media responses and surveys into contextual, cross-channel attribution data, marketers can gain a deeper (and broader) understanding of how their customers’ thoughts and feelings—not only their actions—inform future preferences and decisions.

Profitability > Growth

Despite the availability of cross-channel campaign management platforms, only 46% of executives agree that their employees have the skills needed to manage digital disruption. While this could point to organizations actually lacking competent employees, it’s more likely that:

-          Rapid channel growth has funneled marketers into channel-specific silos (search, display, social, mobile, etc.), leading them to develop cross-channel myopia

-          Employees lack the resources or training necessary to follow the organization’s executive-prescribed direction

Adopting a “big picture” outlook on digital disruption calls for marketers to break out of their silos, but it also demands that the flow of information extends throughout the organizational hierarchy, especially to customer-facing positions. Because of their level of contact with customers, sales professionals and technical staff are a premium source of client data—they know why a customer bought and what they’ll need to continue buying.

Realizing the true value of predictive data relies on collaboration between sales and marketing: combining customers’ stated needs with their digital personas, helping to pinpoint the steps in their buying journey most likely to indicate need fulfillment—it could’ve been a white paper, a webinar, or even a LinkedIn message that brought them over the line.

Whatever the case, predictive analytics allow organizations to focus on long-term profitability, rather than short-term growth; instead of aiming to simply sell another unit, a company-wide devotion to creating and nurturing lifetime customers will spur innovation, causing marketers to develop campaigns that instill lasting value in the minds of prospects. Instead of asking: What next touchpoint would make this prospect most likely to buy, based on their previous actions?, ask: What have similar prospects said about us, and what ideal combination of touchpoints will provide actual value and be most likely to meet their predicted needs?

Marketers using predictive modeling in personalization-only mode, without paying heed to their audience’s non-digital human motivations, will struggle to keep up with the customer-centric, data-driven innovation leaders in the industry. If your organization can identify its highest-value customers, uncover customer-specified values and limitations and share those lessons with organizational stakeholders, all while applying them to predictive marketing strategies, you’ll ultimately be able to engage prospects in an optimal digital conversation. Enough datamongering—it’s time to find out what all your data is really worth.

Here are three reasons why every marketer should look into investing in a platform that centralizes their media-buying efforts.

1. Maximize campaign potential

Marketers strive for campaign accuracy, efficacy, consistency and quality. According to an ExactTarget-commissioned Forrester Consulting survey regarding marketers’ current technology needs, of the seven desired features listed, four are found in any good media-management platform:

• Measurement—tracking standard key performance indicators across channels (44% of respondents)
• Reporting access and flexibility—being able to easily understand cross-channel performance and manipulate reports as needed (38%)
• Real-time optimization—dynamic improvements based on situational data (35%)
• Cross-channel integration—deploying coordinated campaigns across varied channels (29%)

Within a centralized platform, marketers are able to understand cross-channel interplay and optimize campaigns based on a holistic understanding of their disparate parts. Marketers are also able to understand which combinations of campaigns, methods and channels actually worked best and why, providing them with valuable insight when planning future campaigns.

2. Increase operational efficiency

Marketers throw “operational efficiency” around in conversation, when too few have actually invested the time and resources necessary to realize it. Many know that inefficiencies exist, agreeing that current processes are archaic and cumbersome, but little has been done to reform the tedious nature of media planning.

To that end, Namely’s CEO Matt Straz recently wrote an article tellingly titled “The Digital RFP Is A Frustrating Mess.” I agree—RFPs dominate so much of an agency’s time that they’re forced to continually play catch-up, while their core competencies in strategy development and creative design take a backseat. Straz makes a good point regarding time wasted on laborious media-buying processes:

“If you talk to people on both the buy side and sell side of the business, you will hear that the RFP is often the bane of their existence. People who work at agencies are frustrated because RFPs are still largely managed through email. A single RFP sent to a dozen publishers can result in hundreds of emails going back and forth among the parties. Think about that! For a large agency that sends out, say, a thousand digital RFPs each year that means that teams are dealing with over 100,00 emails a year—just about RFPs.”

Marketers shouldn’t have to adhere to legacy processes just because that’s how it has always been done. And the industry certainly shouldn’t have to sacrifice strategy and creative development time in favor of unnecessary manual tasks—simplistic improvements can transform day-to-day operations and secure a long-term future for marketers, maximizing their potential with ad tech.

Marketers can reduce time spent aggregating data for media plans by consolidating fulfillment sources to enable efficient campaign data before, during and after it is executed. Not only does this save considerable time spent aggregating data for media plans, but it also helps to eliminate human error.

3. Improve multi-channel attribution

With the constant adoption of new marketing channels, marketers must understand which method to leverage to best reach their prospects. The seamless cross-channel experience is something worth striving for—if the customer is always right, then it’s crucial to meet them with on-demand content, whenever and wherever they want to connect.

Tracking prospects across channels and over time ensures ad relevance and allows marketers to attribute the correct value to all of the engagement points in the consumer flow, not just the last click. This also allows customers to have a seamless experience across channels while maximizing conversion and engagement potential. With this capability, marketers are also able to augment strategies in real-time as buyers’ behaviors change.

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The advertising industry is in the early innings of a massive consolidation; and as with most industries that possess unnecessary manual processes, innovations in software and technology will continue to feed on advertising’s inefficiencies. Just as famed entrepreneur and investor Mark Andreessen wrote about in his WSJ article “Why Software Is Eating The World,” “More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software.” I strongly feel that centralized platforms are the next piece of software to “eat” the advertising industry.

Below are a few predictions that I expect to take place in 2013:

Monetization solutions will flourish:

Wherever you have a captive audience, there’s an opportunity to make money. And there’s always some genius that finds a way to capitalize on specific audience venues: sports stadiums, mobile apps, even gas pumps and bus benches. In the rapidly evolving industries of advertising and ad tech, new ad formats, channels and types of messaging spring up on a daily basis.

In 2013, we’ll see this trend blossom towards monetization. Older digital formats like banner display ads will receive a boon from monetization solutions like Lijit, recently acquired by Federated Media, to both optimize their portfolio of publisher partners and provide additional value to advertisers.

The developments in mobile marketing have created even more opportunities for innovation mavens, reshaping the look and feel of mobile apps for consumers and business-to-business (B2B) prospects alike. Trulia offers excellent desktop experiences and mirrors its user interface (UI) across all versions of its mobile apps. Trulia’s monetization system allows consumers to connect to real estate agents immediately; mobile app publishers will follow this trend, connecting users to content providers while optimizing the user experience. Self-service mobile ad partners like Millennial Media’s mMedia will provide significant additional revenue streams for apps with substantial traffic.

Native advertising will be the fastest growing monetization solution this year. For those unaware, native advertising goes by a few definitions. CEO of Sharethrough Dan Greenberg refers to native advertising as “a form of media that’s built into the actual visual design and where the ads are part of the content,” while Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer defines it as “advertising that takes advantage of a platform in the ways consumers are actually using it.” The most prominent current examples are Facebook’s Sponsored Stories and Premium Ads and Twitter’s Promoted Tweets, but look to a greater number of media sources and networks like LinkedIn and Pinterest to partner with native ad platforms like Sharethrough to offer advertisers a valuable method to deliver good content without interrupting consistent user experiences.

Apple will join the B2B battle:

Apple continues to churn out consumer electronic devices as fast as the company’s fan boys and girls can scoop them up, and the company has been synonymous with simplicity in design without compromising performance or aesthetics. In the tablet and app markets, Apple is second to none, totaling over half of tablet shipments worldwide in Q3 2012 and commanding nearly 80% of mobile app store traffic in H2 2011. Despite slow market share gains in the smartphone and PC product categories, Apple will revamp its marketing strategy in 2013, moving beyond predominantly B2C marketing to include SMBs and enterprise businesses.

When you’re at the top, everyone is gunning for you. The success of the iPhone and iPad compelled Samsung, Microsoft, Nokia and Asus to overhaul their product portfolios, offering Apple-like gadgets at more affordable prices. Now, with bring your own device (BYOD) becoming such a hot topic in enterprise business, expect the same to happen across the B2B market.

While Apple’s current business offerings aren’t particularly extravagant, they embody Apple’s approach to consumer electronics, with a focus on connecting features to benefits to values for the end user. Leading business computing companies tout hardware specifications that may seem foreign to many non-tech-savvy individuals in the B2B world, which isn’t a problem if their ads are only targeting IT decision-makers.

However, Apple thinks different. Apple knows consumers are also business buyers, influencers and decision-makers and will tailor marketing messages to specific audience segments to drive increased adoption of its business line of products. The App Store will be a huge selling point for B2B buyers, as it offers custom-built apps to address business processes specific to client partners. In 2013, look to Apple to capture a greater share of the mobile B2B market through aggressive marketing of the App Store and Apple products’ greater perceived relevancy to essential business functions.

Technology will dictate success:

Ad networks that are lagging in tech advancement and user experience (UX) improvements will fold. Likewise, major brands will leave their AORs to take their marketing in-house or to technology partners that will do the work of agencies for a fraction of the cost.

According to a recent CMO Council report, just 12% of CMOs surveyed found their agency partners to provide value. The manual tasks for which agencies typically collect 10-18% commission are being replaced with automation. Similarly, brands are moving from large, rep-driven firms for their marketing to self-serve technology platforms like OpenX, Lijit and AppNexus, effectively keeping marketing an internal function. This facilitates real-time campaign oversight and optimization, increases marketing accountability by keeping campaign management in-house, and lowers both the cost and risk of running campaigns through unfavorable publishing sources.

In 2013, we will continue to see the evolution of brands moving away from ineffective ad networks and costly agencies, which means that high-profile players that do not acknowledge this change and innovate accordingly will go out of business seemingly overnight. In the next year, marketers should identify the game-changing technology platforms and begin developing workflows and specific tactics to incorporate these technologies into current marketing strategies.