What’s Your Training Identity?
December 14, 2021
Identity is the largest challenge and opportunity facing digital marketers today. More than 30 percent of developed countries' browsers have already lost the cookie, thanks to Apple and Mozilla, and Google's removal is next. The method behind more than 85 percent of display, mobile, and video advertising, bought programmatically, is fundamentally changing, causing every marketer to assess how they are spending budget today and tomorrow.
Every person, no matter where they work within a brand, publisher, agency, and tech firm, will have at least part of their job change, either now or soon. So how we appreciate, understand, and leverage these changes for our company's/client's/personal benefit is of most importance.
We've Seen This Before
We can plot on a graph the companies that embraced programmatic buying and selling from 2009-2018 and those that folded their arms and said we'll never do that, because they never actually learned what was involved and made wrong assumptions. You can draw a direct line from those companies who took full advantage of this industry change, and those that fell behind.
Growth Is a Commitment
As the son of two teachers, I know I am a bit biased here in touting the value of education and training. But we all have seen firsthand how training helps companies evolve and continue thriving in their categories. We are seeing the same with Identity training, where early testing on various Deterministic, Probabilistic, and Contextual solutions provides an advantage over those waiting for other companies to complete their tests first and go off of their findings.
Probably the easiest way to predict the success of one's career is to track how much training and adaption to change one applies for themselves and their team. Real, personal positive ROI can be directly tracked to training and development, proving time and again that investing in developing teammates and oneself equals more stability, less churn, and better performance.
So What's Your Training Identity?
Will you be the development professional that values learning new strategies and tactics, to apply with your own work and share/teach others around you? Or will you be the last person to change, asking "Who Moved My Cheese?" and why is all this necessary when things still seem to be fine? We recommend acknowledging the change, investing in the improvements and coming up with solutions before they become the mainstream of everyone else.
The views and opinions expressed in Marketing Maestros are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the ANA or imply endorsement from the ANA.
ANA offers professional training services across 4 key areas – Marketing Strategy & Planning, Marketing Execution, Marketing ROI, and Business Skills. With over 100 programs in specific competencies (such as Digital, DEI or Data & Tech) we provide talent transformation solutions that drive growth. All training is aligned to the ANA's Capability Diagnostic Tool. Chat with us to learn more about developing bespoke training for your brand.
Matt Prohaska is an ANA Instructor for the Marketing Training and Development Center. For more on this approach, be sure to view Matt's workshop, "Reaching Your Audience in a Post-Cookie World."