Your story, every moment: personalizing the consumer journey

Introduction

In the ever-evolving world of advertising, staying ahead of the curve is both a challenge and an opportunity. Recently, we held a masterclass at DMEXCO and delved into the intricacies of modern advertising and the pivotal role of personalization in today’s digital landscape. The session brought together Microsoft Advertising’s industry experts; Maximilian Nolte, Head of Media and Ad Tech Solutions in Germany, and Liam Mackessy, Product Marketing Manager for our Display, Native and Video solutions, to explore how brands can delight their customers with the right message at the right time.

Here are some key insights from the event.

Personalizing the consumer journey

We all know that identifying the right audience is crucial. However, the real challenge lies in truly understanding and engaging with them in a way that resonates deeply and drives meaningful interactions. With Microsoft Advertising, you can reach a massive and growing audience with billions of permissioned consumer data points. Microsoft is the only platform with access to permissioned data from massive consumer properties like Bing, Microsoft Edge, LinkedIn, and MSN. By combining search intent, web activity, content preferences, demographic, and behavioral data signals, Microsoft machine-learning allows us to create rich audience intelligence to benefit your marketing efforts. Imagine leveraging Generative AI and AI-powered targeting solutions to personalize marketing in ways we haven't been able to achieve before.

Reshaping the advertising experience

Traditional advertising is created to scale to reach large groups of people, lacking individuality in the ads themselves. But what if we could reshape this experience and make every ad unique to the individual? With billions of signals and data points representing users’ interests and preferences, Microsoft Advertising can help you create highly personalized ads tailored to individual interests. This allows for a connected thread between a brand's story and the environment in which it is delivered.

Optimizing the consumer journey

Today's consumers follow a more complex, non-linear path to purchase and are in more control of their journey than ever before. They can learn about products, compare prices, read reviews, and transact seamlessly across devices and services. Brands need to adapt by moving from purchase funnels to hyper-relevancy at every moment, providing seamless experiences across channels. The purchase now marks the start of an ongoing relationship with the consumer like never before. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the collapsing decision journey and drive more media efficiency.

Connecting the consumer journey

Microsoft Advertising operates a robust multiformat advertising ecosystem, allowing you to connect with your audiences as they stream, browse, work, play, search, and shop. Our extensive reach and scale across the customer decision journey enables us to combine premium owned and operated and third-party supply to create strategic advertising packages, including cross-screen gaming packages. Gaming and Streaming present a unique opportunity to reach an engaged audience across their favorite screens. 85% of people use another device while watching TV, and for gamers, gaming is the number one second-screen activity. This dual-screen behavior presents an opportunity for brands to build recognition and drive conversions by aligning their messaging across screens.

Impression-based remarketing

At DMEXCO, we gave our attendees a sneak-peak into one of our latest product launches. We introduced Impression-Based Remarketing, a feature in the Microsoft Advertising Platform that helps improve brand awareness and ad recall by ensuring our brand stays top-of-mind through strategic ad exposure. This feature allows for a more connected consumer journey with meaningful and relevant connections, thanks to sequential messaging that respects the consumer's non-linear path to purchase. It also increases performance with personalized ads that are more likely to drive action and lead to conversions. This feature can be used with all campaign types in the Microsoft Advertising Platform, including Connected TV and Search ads, making it a game-changer for sequential messaging and meaningful connections across the full funnel. Stay tuned over the coming weeks for its official launch to the Microsoft Advertising Platform!

Conclusion

The importance of optimizing the consumer journey and leveraging advanced targeting solutions to create personalized and connected advertising experiences is critical to stay ahead in the advertising game. By utilizing the rich data and AI-powered capabilities of Microsoft Advertising, brands can drive meaningful interactions, improve campaign performance, and build lasting relationships with their consumers.

Reach out to our experts today at Microsoft Advertising Support for all of your marketing needs.