Indiana-based equipment reseller SIGMA Equipment implemented a new CRM during the pandemic. SIGMA Equipment began as Sigma Packaging and has continued to serve manufacturers primarily with the buying and selling of packaging and processing machines in the food and beverage, pharmaceutical, health and beauty and consumer goods industries.

The implementation of the CRM from Insightly came at a time when SIGMA Equipment was experiencing significant change in the needs of manufacturers during the pandemic, as well as internal organizational change.

According to the lead for the Appraisal Division, Randa Doleh, the marketing software prior to the new CRM had been developed internally.

“Given our rate of growth, we couldn’t continue to rely on the current software,” said Doleh. “We needed a scalable solution.”

She said that she was “impressed with the flexibility that came with the Insightly CRM, out-of-the-box.” It enabled divisions within the organization to develop customized solutions while also being connected. This allowed for more strategic decisions to be made when it came to serving customers and managing the growth.

“The main use for the CRM is for departments to communicate with customers,” Doleh said. “This spans across multiple divisions, and we all need a full view of the customer.”

Having this full view of the customer available to multiple teams also opens up strategic opportunities across departments. “If I’m in a meeting with our sales team, I’m allowed to take a step back and see what other divisions can benefit, which means we’re really able to scale our output,” Doleh stated.

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Getting businesses who are focused on traditional marketing to pivot into the digital space is no easy feat. Many business owners don’t realize the impact that a strong online presence can have on their bottom line.

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With third-party cookies going away, the identifier space — alternative ways of finding and addressing consumers — is the scene of intense activity. Here are the latest moves:

Infutor and Unified ID 2.0. Infutor, the first-party data-based consumer identity resolution and management platform has announced it is joining the Unified ID 2.0 eco-system. This universal identifier was developed by The Trade Desk but will be managed by open source ad auction solution Prebid.org. 

Infutor VP of Strategy Todd Schoenherr told us: “Infutor is appending data from Unified ID 2.0 and has already added Unified ID 2.0 ids to its graph of over 266 million individuals and 120 US households. Infutor clients will be able to populate audiences within The Trade Desk for activation, and Infutor data will be available in The Trade Desk for use in campaigns.”

InMobi: The in-app advertising platform has launched its own solution for in-app mobile identity, UnifID (pronounced “unified”). Designed to help app publishers make their advertising inventory more addressable and thus higher value, UnifID will work as a standalone solution or in combination with other identifiers.

Publishers will be able to send first-party data-based audiences upstream to DSPs to attract media buys. They will also be able to integrate data from LiveRamp’s ATS, ID5 (see below) and Britepool.

Mediavine and ID5. Mediavine, the full-service ad management platform, will be partnering with ID5, an identity solution for digital advertising. Mediavine’s Grow.me is an audience engagement framework which helps large numbers of small publishers collect and manage first-party audience data. ID5 aims to provide a stable, consented and encrypted first-party data-based user ID.

The partnership will extend the reach of publishers beyond their own, authenticated audiences. This will enable both deterministic and probabilistic targeting.

Why we care. There’s an irony in this explosion of competitive activity to establish universal identifiers. One might ask, if these identifiers are universal, why do we need so many of them? Also, we’d love to see a little more variety in the names. “So powerful is the light of unity that it can illuminate the whole earth,” said Persian religious leader Baháʼu’lláh. Or the whole addressable audience anyway.

Smartly.io surveyed global retail brands to learn how they approach their social advertising strategies in 2021. Read this report to find out what’s changed over the past year with retail organizations’ social media advertising initiatives, explore what those differences mean for the retail industry, and see how they can help your organization plan its social media advertising strategy in the future.

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Yesterday was Earth Day, as good a time as any to ask what brands are doing to communicate to their audience about climate change. The creative analytics platform CreativeX examined some 280,000 global ads to find out what brands are saying about climate change, and how their messaging varies by region. Although over 80% of respondents to a Global Consumer Confidence Survey, across age and gender, felt strongly that brands should help improve the environment, only 2% of the ads analyzed by CreativeX referred to positive climate initiatives.

Some brands do see a need to spread positive messages. The automotive industry, for example, is keen to talk about reduced emissions and electric vehicles. It leads industries in climate-related ad content, followed by fashion. EMEA led regions with 3.7% of ads addressing climate-related topics, with France leading the region. Latin America had the lowest percentage, even though consumers are as deeply invested in environmental protection in that region as consumers in Europe.

Why we care. Hopefully it’s obvious why we care about the environment. But from a marketing perspective, it’s astonishing that brands are essentially leaving consumer good will on the table — in contrast to a very evident focus on diversity and inclusion in today’s ad strategies.

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“Conspiracy theory: Big Tech intentionally makes auto-correct suck to reduce fear over artificial intelligence.” Ari Paparo, CEO and co-founder, Beeswax