R2 Media’s Top 10 Takeaways From RampUp 23

I dispatched R2 Media’s Head of Investment to San Francisco this week for a host of reasons, but no reason was more important than RampUp 23, the annual data conference. The event brings together data professionals from Procter & Gamble, Kraft Heinz, Pepsico, Albertsons, and scores of other prominent brands. RampUp is produced by LiveRamp, a long time partner of R2 Media, and in fact, a long time partner to virtually all of the savvy marketers involved in advertising technology. If they are buying ads programmatically, using any tactic — Connected TV, Streaming Audio, Digital Display — they or their trusted programmatic vendor is probably working with LiveRamp. The day before the RampUp event began, R2 Media also attended LiveRamp’s Partner Day, an intimate, swanky affair at The Battery (there is some interesting internet-folklore attached to The Battery, but we’ll save that for another blog).

LiveRamp has long been known as a data enablement platform for savvy marketers to activate their 1st-party, 2nd-party and 3rd-party audiences in to their ad campaigns, but its CEO Scott Howe went to great lengths on Partner Day and during his RampUp keynote address to reframe the company as a data collaboration platform or “DCP.” Jokingly, he said, just what the industry needs “another acronym.” Howe’s point, ties to the fact that no one data company has a complete data set on any and all people; that holistic views of consumers can only be produced when differing data companies take their differing data sets and stitch them together. He maintained, quite convincibly, I am told, that only through a collaborative effort of conjoining data sets can marketers find their holy grail. LiveRamp wants to be the shop where all that data comes together and the marketing holy grail is unearthed. They want to enable, or activate, multi-party collaborations, in a privacy-first manner, and provide cross-screen measurements for marketing campaigns targeted against those audiences. No small task, no doubt!

Coming away from the three-day event, R2 Media compiled a list of our Top Ten Takeaways from RampUp 23 and it is featured below.

1. Leverage first-party data in a marketer’s CRM to build people-based segments for improved Omnichannel campaign targeting.

2. Build high-impact audience strategies to identify customers who are actively shopping and open to buy.

3. Use third-party data to confirm first-party segments and bring ‘net new’ prospects to a marketer’s pool of audience segments.

4. Run ads in an Omnichannel-approach across TV, radio, digital, OOH, among others, to speak with marketing prospects across channels they prefer.

5. Optimize Omnichannel campaigns holistically, measuring reach and frequency across tactics and, as importantly, over time.

6. Measure sales attribution, store visits, site visits, performance of digital ads, and let the associated performance ‘smarten’ your media mix.

7. Resolve data across sources and touch points at the household level to influence the marketer’s acquisition and retention strategy.

8. Enrich the marketer’s data strategy with collaboration for customer intelligence that provides an improved understanding of the customer and the customer’s media consumption.

9. Spot new shopping trends, reach audiences and better understand customer behaviors with enriched data (through data collaborations).

10. Expand the marketer’s direct mail and email campaigns to reach new customers by leveraging their CRM and building prospect audiences.

In all, RampUp 23 was a great event that will continue to add to the product and services that R2 Media brings to advertising market. Not only were there tactical benefits to RampUp, the event will likely strengthen the strategic relationship between R2 Media and LiveRamp.