Teradata’s Bob Fair offers retail, CPG marketing tips

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Aside from some massively complex challenges, retailer and consumer packaged goods marketers have never had it so good, according to Bob Fair, president of marketing applications at Teradata.

“It is a great time to be a marketer,” Fair told a group of nearly 100 analysts and international media gathered here at the Anaheim Convention Center for the big data analytics and marketing applications company’s annual users conference. “There is an explosion of digital channels so companies no longer dictate how to interact with customers, the customers dictate how to interact with companies.”

Meanwhile, Fair noted that marketing budgets are not keeping pace with the rate of growth in the channels available to connect with consumers who expect individualized marketing.

“The customer doesn’t care how challenging individualized marketing is, they expect you to know who they are and what they have just done,” Fair said regarding consumers’ behavior at different touch point on the path to purchase.

Between the increased complexity and resource constraints, the scenario outlined by Fair sounded more like a nightmare than “a great time to be a marketer.” However, his enthusiasm about marketing stems from the fact that technological solutions now exists that help markets cost effectively solve huge challenges to create business value.

Most notably, marketers today have access to more customer data and more digital and offline channels for brand engagement than ever before. As a result, both the process and technology of modern marketing have advanced  from an advertising-driven mix of TV, print, radio, direct mail, and programmatic marketing  to today’s data-driven environment with the Internet of Things, new devices, and new channels including search, social media, email, mobile, web and more.  According to Teradata, the added complexity puts marketers in critical need of a Data Management Platform (DMP) to collect and integrate all of the data for use in real time across all channel opportunities.

How to address those critical needs amid the big data explosion is one of the reasons why Teradata’s 30th annual Partners conference attracted roughly 6,000 attendees. It’s also why Fair is excited by what Teradata has done with a major upgrade to the Teradata’s Integrated Marketing Cloud and one of the company’s recent acquisitions.

Teradata acquired the Netherlands-based DMP provider FLXone on Sept. 30 to serve as the foundation for Teradata’s Integrated Marketing Cloud. As a result, Teradata contends it is the first company to bring online advertising and customer marketing data together to drive real-time interactions across all channels and provide integrated, individualized insights directly to marketing.  FLXone also brings an extensive partner ecosystem with more than 40 leading advertisers, publishers, agencies, and media trading desks, including AppNexus, Google DoubleClick and MediaMath, according to Teradata.

“These partnerships will enable customers to quickly integrate their data and applications with the Teradata Integrated Marketing Cloud, so they can leverage data in real-time, across all channels, to provide a consistent customer-engagement experience,” the company said in a statement.