The Adobe 2013 Video Conversion Playbook touches on some important concepts that all marketers should be aware of but I wonder how many brands have the framework in place to support some of the suggestions.

The playbook is  a guide for brands on how to effectively use video - and one step in particular got my attention:

Step #2, Understand Your Audience, is actually a discussion about the Customer Journey and what happens when you start to address the earlier Awareness phase. It divides customers into three camps, from Casual browers to Existing customers. These customer groups are defined by their level of engagement with the brand, which sync up well with phases of the Customer Journey (Awareness, Consideration, Inquiry and Purchase).

The guide urges brands essentially to consider the distinct phases of the Customer Journey and to design marketing (in this case video) to address each phase.
Sounds simple, but most digital marketers have a performance or DR mindset - online is primarily utilized for later-stage Purchase phase media. When designing for earlier phase campaigns, you need to keep in mind that the outcomes will look very different.

You need to adjust your total measurement framework for what happens when you suddenly open up your marketing to reach customers early on – what you will lose in overall efficiencies (that tired mainstay of digital, ROI), you will gain in sales volume. Balanced correctly, this means a big bump in profit.

This is the crux of what we do – our software at it's most fundamental is an instrument for profitable growth through digital branding. I wonder how many brands out there are prepared for this kind of change. How many have adjusted their measurement framework to make this kind of growth possible?

I'm really liking the distinction made in this article between predictive analytics, which tells businesses what will happen and prescriptive analytics, which  tells them what to do about it.

It reminds me of the separation made between data and decision except prescriptive analytics is actually software. Companies like Ayata have prescriptive tools that "recommend specific courses of action and show the likely outcome of each decision." It's an "automated system that combines big data, business rules, mathematical models and machine learning" to deliver recommendations fast.

But here's the problem: as great as all that sounds (who doesn't want a time machine right?), only 3% of business today are using something like it. I think this is because it's just too new and too complicated to be incorporated into mainstream practice.

If you want people to adopt disruptive innovation, you need to start simple. This is the principle we've been using in spreading the adoption of our own methods. We could also call what we're doing prescriptive analytics, as they relate to seeking maximum profitability through marketing.

The results are the same: we can tell you how a market is likely to react - the kind of revenues you can expect from a given market - and how you should use media in that area. We can tell you the best markets to go into, and how much you'll need to spend to attain maximum profitably.

And the best part-  it's deceptively simple. While there's a lot of concepts that come together to make it work, you don't need an advanced degree to comprehend the results, which is what I would guess these other players suffer from.

A recent HBR piece asks the question, "Why, if digital is so measurable and targeted, does traditional ad spend still outnumber digital by 3 to 1?" In a nut shell, the writer says, because the CMO's don't get it and they're scared.

He says there is something "fundamental happening behind the numbers; something lurking in the very nature of digital marketing and what it asks of leadership and what it means for accountability." That something, he suggests, is exactly what we're always talking about - a "digital disconnect in the executive ranks".

We translate this to mean that digital performance is not communicated at the boardroom- manager- level. Reporting is focused instead on media, and it's done so in a way that's too complex. Hence, the fear, and frankly the disinterest.

The article also says that the CMO feels scared by digital because it means they are held more accountable for performance. We would disagree with this statement. In fact, in our experience, the CMO feels better when they have a relatively low risk way of assuring profitability. When they know more, rather than less. The trick is knowing more about what really matters- not media, but the business affects of that media.

Our solution strips away the complexity around the media. It delivers a roadmap for profitable growth through marketing. Because ultimately, that's the only thing the CMO should care about.