There is a huge gap between the potential of Digital Marketing and the reality of how we actually experience it today. For Performance Marketers, I believe there are two key reasons for that: the assumption that customers can be defined in advance, and that channels can be optimized independently. Both are costing more than most attribution models will ever show.

Let me bring that to life. Imagine you are trying to sell an all-inclusive holiday to a resort in Jamaica to someone who generally likes that kind of holiday and is considering booking one in the coming months. What does the perfect interaction between that Brand and that potential customer look like?

If I were designing it using web marketing, I would make sure they start seeing television ads for the resort. Beautiful, TV screen creative, just before the show they are currently watching every night. Just give them that warm summery feeling and make a positive connection between them and the Brand. 

As they load video content on their phone, we show them more of the resort. They see the gym, spa, pools, and restaurants (‘oooh, they have padel!’).

As they start reading travel reviews, native advertising becomes powerful because the message sits naturally within trusted content. Now we can get a bit clearer on pricing and value. A week out from booking a holiday, we reach that customer with high-impact display creatives, being really specific on price and a limited-time discount. 

That journey feels coherent. The brand is delivering a rounded view of its product to this potential customer. As the customer naturally moves through their life, they also move through this brand's sales cycle. I reckon you have a good chance of selling that holiday to that customer.

But most people reading this have very rarely experienced a coherent interaction with a brand like that. You might have a brand that dominates one channel, or one format, in any given period. In reality, that fluid, multi-channel / format communication feels very, very rare. 

The gap between what is possible and the reality of how people experience digital marketing feels so big. But why? At Quantcast, we believe two core reasons: Assumptions & Silos (and we’re on a bit of a mission to get rid of them for you). 

The assumption problem

Most Web advertising platforms ask performance marketers to make assumptions about who their customers are before a campaign ever launches. You log in, browse hundreds of audience segments, mix and match based on what you know, and the responsibility for defining the customer sits entirely with you. The platform executes whatever you tell it to.

The problem is that people do not move through the world as fixed personas, within static segments. Intent, context, and life circumstances change constantly. Think about the thousand different versions of that Jamaica vacation customer. The person who has been dreaming about it for a year and just got a bonus. The couple who decided to book a holiday last Tuesday after a hard few months. The solo traveler who saw a friend's Instagram post and made a snap decision. All valuable customers. 

Performance Marketers need more. They need systems that recognize every valuable version of their customer and react to their changing intent. Static assumptions are a big reason for the gap. 

The silo problem

We, real people, do not think in channels. We don’t typically build mental boundaries between the ad we saw before a YouTube video and the one that appeared in our news feed.

Most campaigns, however, still operate in silos. CTV bought through one partner, and online video through another. Display through a DSP, and native through an agency. Each channel has its own team, KPI, budget, and definition of success that rarely connects to the one metric that actually matters to a performance marketer: revenue.

When customer journeys become fragmented in this way, brands do not just lose coherence; they also lose their impact. They lose efficiency, performance, and ultimately revenue. 

What a system designed around people actually looks like

The question we’ve been asking is not how to make siloed systems work better together. It is what advertising would look like if it were built around the customer journey from the beginning, rather than retrofitted around channel structures that were never designed with the customer in mind.

Q+ was built to answer that question. Rather than relying on static audience assumptions, it continuously learns from real customer behavior, identifying and reacting to every version of your customer in real time. Within elite performance at scale, our Beta customers were delighted to see Q+ reach pockets of untouched customers, circumstantial opportunities that arise momentarily. 

Rather than optimizing channels separately, it brings CTV, online video, display, and native together into a single performance system, continuously allocating budget based on where the customer is in their journey and what is most likely to move them towards a conversion.

"As performance marketing becomes more complex, the ability to simplify execution while maintaining a relentless focus on outcomes is increasingly important,” says Ben Norville, Senior Programmatic Director at PMG. “What impressed us about Q+ was its ability to continuously adapt and optimize toward our business objectives without requiring constant manual intervention. It represents a fundamentally different approach to performance marketing and aligns closely with where we see the industry heading."

What becomes possible when assumptions and silos are removed

The results reflect what becomes possible when the assumption and silo problems are removed simultaneously. A leading global electric vehicle brand saw a 72% increase in absolute conversions, and a top digital retailer achieved a 2.2 times increase in revenue with just 23% of the budget. 

These are the kind of results that happen when a system is finally built around the customer journey rather than the channel structure, when real-time behavior replaces static assumptions, and when every format works together towards a single outcome, rather than competing for credit on the same conversion.

A connected customer experience shouldn't be the exception. It is an engineering problem. And now, it has been engineered. If you are still planning performance campaigns channel by channel, team by team, KPI by KPI, a question worth asking is not how to make that model work better. It is what your results would look like if you stopped making assumptions about your customers and let a system that never stops learning react to who they actually are in real time.

The answer, based on the evidence, is significantly better than what you are seeing now.

Find out more at https://www.quantcast.com/platform/ai/q-plus