The Rise of the Platform Marketer: Performance Marketing with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, Plus the Latest High-Growth Digital Advertising Platforms

Chapter 3Introducing the Platform Marketer

To take advantage of these new and constantly changing audience platforms and to create clear differentiation among a sea of competitors, brands must create an ongoing and relevant dialogue with their customers. It becomes exceedingly difficult with the continued proliferation of inbound digital consumer-to-brand channels (such as websites and call centers), outbound digital brand-to-consumer media (such as display advertising and email), and the platforms themselves. Brands are developing a new array of skills, tools, processes, and metrics; and they are building or acquiring the expertise to implement these capabilities in their day-to-day engagements with consumers. This is imperative for the survival of any customer-centric organization, as the environment becomes more and more competitive. Indeed, it is imperative for the Platform Marketer himself to develop these skills. Due to the increased complexity of leveraging data, technology, and analytics in this new era, the brands that capitalize on addressability at scale will create more enduring and sustained competitive advantage.

As we touched on in Chapter 1, the Platform Marketer embodies a collection of competencies that are required to take advantage of addressability at scale. Those USPS-based Platform Marketer competencies that worked in the past have similarities but also significant differences from what's required now. Today's digital marketplace calls for a marketing ...