Blis was a keynote speaker at yesterday’s Digiday Modern Retail Summit in Miami, Florida. Gil Larsen, our US Managing Director, spoke to top retail marketers about what brands must be doing to drive growth in today’s challenging landscape. 

He discussed how the remit for brands has always been adding net new consumers to their market by changing consumer behavior or stealing customers from a competitor. Basically growing the pie or growing the slice of the pie. Ideally, brands will do both.

To do that, brands have historically relied on the age-old formula of right people, right place, right message, right time. However, even with Google’s decision to delay the disappearance of third-party cookies, brands are currently missing at least 45% of addressable audiences. That’s in addition to headwinds like a convoluted path to purchase, an oversaturated retail market, and rocky economic times – the perfect storm for retail marketers. 

He urged the marketers in the room to not just forge ahead with the ‘old’ formula, because they’ll end up losing sight of their audiences and missing out on opportunities to reach them with messaging they actually care about. Instead, brands must focus on finding accurate seed data, whether that’s real-world location data or first-party data, and layering on hundreds of anonymized datasets to make sure that data is accurate and – keyword – scalable. He walked the conference-goers through Blis’ Audience Explorer, demonstrating that even in today’s complicated landscape, retailers of all types – brick and mortar, pure e-commerce, or hybrid models – can still achieve their full-funnel business outcomes and reach 100% of their addressable audiences. 

Learn more about Blis’ Audience Explorer here.

In yesterday’s IAB Audience Connect breakout session, Diane Perlman, our CMO touched on how everyone’s so focused on the almighty cookie – but we’re missing the more pressing, “today” issue. 46% of US addressable audiences on mobile and 40% of US addressable audiences on desktop are being missed today. In this dynamic discussion with Danielle Mathews, VP of Performance & Commerce Media at Mosaic; Jeremy Cornfeldt, CEO of Brainlabs and Nishant Desai, Group Director of Technology & Operations at Xaxis, Diane explained that while Google has once again delayed the cookie demise, there is already a ‘data drought’ happening. “There really needs to be a whole mindset shift away from personal data, but a lot of marketers seem to want to ignore the problem and hope it goes away (business as usual),” Diane said. 

“We’ve gotten ‘lazy’ by relying on one strategy to reach people. We need to look at a blend of signals to understand how to get the most performance out of campaigns,” Nishant explained. 

Danielle discussed current solutions, particularly from a first-party data standpoint. “We’re urging clients to ask the hard questions – where is the data coming from, why these solutions, does it hold up to scrutiny? Really making sure we’re taking the right approach.”

With all the talk about first-party data, Jeremy is advising clients to “make sure their ‘house’ is clean, make sure their data is accurate and their taxonomies are in order.”

Diane then wrapped up the discussion with how Blis’ dynamic privacy-first tool, Audience Explorer can help brands and agencies discover powerful insights about their unique audiences, build richer media plans, and activate them right in our platform to deliver better outcomes at scale in a privacy-friendly way.

Book a demo of Audience Explorer, our privacy-first privacy tool, today.

• Moderator: Diane Perlman, Global CMO at Blis
• Panelist: Danielle Mathews (Seaman), VP of Performance & Commerce Media at Mosaic America
• Panelist: Jeremy Cornfeldt, CEO at Brainlabs
• Panelist: Nishant Desai, Group Director, Technology & Operations at Xaxis