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Zer0to5ive worked with Rocket Fuel on its first virtual summit designed to promote its leadership in digital marketing. The result was MOMENTOUS 2015 hosted on November 11, 2015. Fourteen speakers from Microsoft, IBM, Forrester, Fast Company, Rocket Fuel, Marketo, Booyah Advertising, DISH and more explored the game-changing role of programmatic in today’s data-driven marketing.

One of the keynote speakers was Grad Conn, CMO Lead at Microsoft responsible for all central marketing activities for the $14B US commercial business. Conn’s session, titled “How the Modern Marketing Department Will Transform Your Business,” begins by outlining the four stages of Modern Marketing, as opposed to the traditional sales funnel.

The Four Stages of Modern Marketing

1. Unknown Acquisition — Anonymous Visitors
2. Known Nurture — Known Prospects > Marketing Automation Qualified Lead (MAQL)
3. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) Nurture
4. Customer Nurture

Unknown Acquisition includes all visitors from social media engagement, organic traffic, 3^rd party on-person events, online events—such as MOMENTOUS—and, most relevant to the topic at hand, paid media. In order to take full advantage of online advertising, today’s marketers need to learn and invest in the latest technologies that capture anonymous visitors with paid media. Using real-world market testing from his own team, Conn proves the benefits of real-time creative optimization paired with programmatic media buying.

Real-time Creative Optimization with RevJet

RevJet empowers a marketer to test creative options against real media by creating HTML5 on the fly and trafficking it. Conn lacks the ego and exaggeration endemic to Silicon Valley and readily admits that it’s hard to predict what creative will capture consumer interest, even for a seasoned CMO like himself. Creative Optimization bases decision-making on data, not opinion.

In the case of a Microsoft hiring campaign, creative optimization alone doubled lift vs. control with little effort and no additional media spend.

Programmatic Media Buying with Rocket Fuel

Like many corporations, Microsoft traditionally used a media buying agency as an intermediary to different publishers. Retainer fees totaled several million dollars each year, but even more costly was the back-and-forth. In Modern Marketing, rapid iteration is critical.

Rocket Fuel’s programmatic media buying bypasses an agency and dramatically increases speed to market from weeks to hours and days. Additionally, marketers have the capability to refine targeting parameters, allocate flighting and budget and can upload 1^st party audience data from BlueKai. The Rocket Fuel Reporting Dashboard measures costs, clicks, impressions and traces a campaign against spend.

Throughout the session, Conn stresses the value of real-time analytic capabilities. Not only can marketers use this data to immediately tailor content for optimized results, they can keep their performance numerically based. “Be held to a hard number,” Conn says, “so you can be rewarded for that hard number.” Providing an ROI for investments will transition a marketing department from a cost center to a revenue center.

Conn’s parting advice to markers is to always be learning and experimenting. In the recent past, web advertising was cutting-edge, but now social is mainstreaming quickly. Who knows what the next media channel will be—all we know is that Grad Conn will be one of the first to try it.

Visit Momentous2015.com to access Grad Conn’s presentation, as well as those from the other amazing speakers!