Ogilvy: The real-time brand revolution is here and brands need to be ready to engage

Ogilvy Experience, together with Verticurl and Adobe, has released a new report entitled “Return on Real-time” which illustrates the future of real-time customer engagement, and the innovations brands can expect to use to improve customer satisfaction, increase efficiency and create sales. From individualizable augmented reality display to the simple expedience of timely mobile notifications, the potential payoffs of real-time engagement are significant.

To ensure that real-time engagement with consumers feels genuine and authentic, brands will need customer journey management technology to orchestrate seamless experiences, as well as sensitive and insightful creative strategies — a foundation to gather information, analyze with intelligence, and activate intervention in real-time.

Sheilen Rathod, President, Experience Ogilvy, China and Asia, said: “The pandemic has accelerated real-time innovation at record speed and raised the bar for customer experience standards. Two years on, new technology, new category disruptors, new social commerce platforms, new market shifts and new consumer expectations are still pushing brands to double down on their transformation. And while investment in data and digital technology has exploded, the reality is that only a small subset of businesses is leveraging them to their full potential today.”

The technologies that will shape the future of real-time engagement are already here: data, intelligence (APIs, AIs, and Predictive Analytics), and intervention (personalisation and augmented reality). The challenge is putting it all together, gaining and retaining customer trust, and operationalizing in ways that customers value.

“Brands can now build a single platform that allows them to combine and analyze data in ways that unlock all kinds of contextual opportunities,” says Don Huynh, Product Manager, Adobe Journey Optimizer. “Unified, real-time customer profiles change the nature of segmentation and let brands send personalized messages rapidly across multiple channels right at the time they are most likely to influence behavior.”

By becoming more intimate with customers however, brands run the risk of being disruptive rather than helpful. With so much risk for mishandled customer experiences, brands will rely on customers to agree to opt-in to share their data, which helps brands deliver on these experiences, with transparency. And then they’ll have to rely on good judgement—judgement developed by hard-won lessons in some cases—to get the balance between assistance and alienation just right.

One technology that will likely become increasingly important in the quest for trust are CDPs. Customer data platforms create a shared record of where customer data has been. It will be possible for customers to sign up to share data with you in exchange for real-time services and for you to make certain no one else is getting hold of their information.

Brands need to find ways to provide valued experiences along the customer journey, informed by insight as well as hard data. They need to ensure that customers truly value brands as partners and are willing to let them be part of the moment right now because they contribute positively to it. Permission to be closer with customers is not a license to be ever-present. Begin with the moments when the brand has a clear role and can create valued experiences.

With imagination, empathy, and creativity, brands can invent some truly inspiring and valued experiences for their customers. Brands need a clear promise on the value they can provide to serve as the springboard for creativity and innovation. By following this path they can create a better now together with their customers.

To read the full report, click here.