Wiland Blog

I look forward to the RampUp conference every year. It is, of course, a golden opportunity to connect with industry friends and marketing innovators. But it is also an important annual event where marketers gain fresh perspective on the current digital advertising landscape. This year’s event was no different.

I attended the 2023 RampUp event in San Francisco last week. I found it brimming with valuable insights and strategies, as top marketers shared their stories on how they have honed their uses of data to more effectively target their campaigns and achieve better digital advertising results.

Here are a few of my takeaways from the event:

1. A proactive data privacy mindset is key to future-proofing your marketing.
   Multiple new state-level data privacy laws have been introduced in the U.S. this year, and more are on the way. This patchwork of state-level laws has presented challenges for many marketers as they look to both stay in compliance and continue to reach their ideal customers. This means two things for marketers:
   • First, that marketers must be proactive about ensuring that their data partners uphold the highest data privacy standards. Your data privacy compliance is only as good as that of your partners. Data partners’ approaches to and handling of data privacy is a key consideration for brands and agencies when choosing data partners today.
   • Second, that it’s important for marketing experts and innovators to reach out and engage with appropriate lawmakers to educate them on the importance of ethical, data-driven marketing. This will help ensure that future laws, whether at the state or federal level, will be beneficial to both consumers and the economy.
2. Choose quality, not just quantity, when building your data stack.
   In the rush to embrace data as a vital resource in their marketing efforts, advertisers can often fall into the assumption that acquiring more data is always better. But this is not always true. The quality of the data used for targeting your marketing directly correlates to how impactful it will be in driving campaign results. Marketers need to be conscious of the quality and diversity of the data sources that they are using—both their own and those of their data partners. From comprehensive, diverse, and recent individual-level consumer spending data to social media engagement data, demographic data, and more, marketers should seek out diverse but carefully selected information to inform their media targeting in order to achieve the best campaign results.
3. Find a data collaboration solution that works for you…probably more than one.
   Finding high-value data to inform media targeting requires data collaboration. There are multiple types of data collaboration, each with its own unique benefits. The results of using data clean rooms like Snowflake in particular were explored during RampUp this year. But there are other data collaboration options that marketers should be considering as well, including working with a data cooperative or a data marketplace or exchange.
4. The digital TV future is imminent, and high-quality data plays a major role.
   “Unprecedented acceleration.” That’s how presenters described the growth of CTV during the conference. And it’s a universal sentiment. IAB reported in November that media investment via CTV is expected to increase by 14.4% in 2023 compared to 2022.₁ Statista reported in January that CTV ad spend is expected to grow to $38.83 billion in the U.S. by 2026.₂ CTV is both an exciting and evolving arena for digital marketers. But even as the channel grows and changes, using audiences built from the best consumer spending data is the foundation for successful CTV advertising programs.

Wiland was proud to sponsor this year’s RampUp conference, and the RampPups in particular! I’d be remiss to not mention these adorable conference attendees. We hope that you had the chance to stop by to say hello to the RampPups and connect with the Wiland team during the event.

I look forward to attending, sponsoring, and presenting at more of these valuable events in the future.

₁ “CTV ad spending expected to grow 14.4% in 2023, linear TV drops: IAB.” 2022, Fierce Video.

₂ “Connected TV advertising spending in the United States from 2019 to 2026.” 2023, Statista.