Payments: The New Gold-Standard Data for Advertising?

In her recent article on PYMTS.com, “Are Card Networks Tomorrow’s Ad Platform?,” Karen Webster makes a great point that card-linked offer networks are going to be disruptive to the media and marketing industries. She’s right! Mostly. These networks are just one piece of the puzzle – this is a market where the entire payments industry is destined to become connected to the advertising industry. Payment data is the new “must have” data for advertisers since a purchase demonstrates clear attribution and ROI.

Still questioning the potential impact that payment data will have on advertising?As our co-founder Tom Burgess says, less than a decade ago nobody thought consumers would interact with an ad on their smartphone or that social media would emerge as a key platform for advertising. It’s clear now that that the shift to mobile and social was transformational in terms of what it meant to consumers and the growth that businesses could attribute to advertising dollars spent.

Payment data is a critical tool for advertisers for the same reason that the boom in social advertising occurred. Social media allowed for entirely new targeting methods as advertisers equipped themselves with massive amounts of consumer data. Payment data equips advertisers with one of the most critical data points – where and how consumers spend their dollars. As a marketer, if you could pinpoint how often a consumer buys your specific products, where they buy it and whether they buy it because they saw an ad or received an offer – wouldn’t you want to have that information before making your next marketing or advertising decision? No brainer.

If marketers want to see the value of their efforts, they should turn to the intersection of payments and promotions - card-linked offers. Karen mentions that offers are currently too sparse or too untargeted. Another challenge is getting consumers to actually pay attention to their card-linked offers and opt-in to them. Two weeks ago, we unveiled a study by Forrester that found that the number one obstacle to digital coupon usage is ease of use.

Ironically, digital coupons today are viewed as harder to use than print. In addition, many of the card-linked players have forced advertisers to market in an entirely new channel versus allowing them to link-enable their standard media buys, in all media types. The latter clearly makes it much more efficient and valuable to the advertiser.

For payment data to have real impact, marketers must govern their advertising and promotion dollars based on the revenue and traffic they are driving. Not blindly assuming that it works because “sales are up.” Payments will certainly have a major impact on where advertising dollars are spent in the near future and it will be interesting to see how current industry players approach this growing market.