User Experience Design
The creation of compelling experience for users of digital technologies, provided by firms that offer user experience design and engineering, online GUI design and development, and customer experience consulting.
Agile Marketing Project Management
A method that applies tools, processes and organizational design concepts, inspired by software development methodology, to make marketing programs more relevant, more adaptive and efficient.
Site Search
Tools to maintain and present a searchable index of content on a web site.
A/B and Multivariate Testing
Tools and techniques that support comparative analysis of marketing alternatives, such as content, navigation or keyword selection, by using experimental controls.
Emerging Technology
Technology innovations in an early stage of maturity, encompassing initial commercialization of technology by vendors and pilots and deployments by industry leaders, with typically less than 5% market penetration. Emerging technology products are typically first-generation and high-priced, and require much customization.
Real-Time Decisioning
The combination of predictive analytics and decision capabilities to identify the optimal action to take during a customer interaction based on the customer's needs and the organization's strategy.
Natural Language Questioning
Applications that provide users with a means of asking a question in plain language that a computer or service can answer with a meaningful spoken response in a reasonable time frame.
Customer Analytics
The use of data to understand the composition, needs and satisfaction of the customer base. Also, the enabling technology used to segment buyers into groupings based on behavior, to determine general trends, or to develop targeted marketing and sales activities.
Content Marketing Platforms
Tools and services used by marketers to create, curate, collate and cultivate branded, user-generated and third-party content across multiple channels.
Automatic Content Generation
Systems that generate topical articles (text with optional images) fit for human consumption, based on semantic rules and subject data.
Business Process Outsourcers
Providers that offer managed services that combine automated systems with human resources to accomplish well-defined tasks within agreed-upon timing, quality, and cost parameters.
Email Marketing Services
Providers that help companies use email as a method for demand generation and brand engagement.
Microlocation
The ability to pinpoint the position of an enabled device, such as a smartphone, with high precision within a defined range of coverage, in order to trigger a location-specific message or event.
Loyalty Marketing
A discipline used to market the benefits of a sustained relationship with a brand by illustrating cost-of-ownership benefits that are achievable through long-term loyalty. Loyalty marketing often includes the management of loyalty cards, discount clubs or other programs designed to encourage and reward repeat purchases and long-term loyalty.
Tag Management
Systems simplify the deployment and maintenance of JavaScript tags that are used to exchange data between online content and external applications, such as analytics, advertising and personalization. One tag replaces all others, which then controls publishing of the appropriate tags. This decouples tag operations from the life cycle of online content and improves the speed of deployment and changes for tag-based products.
In-App and Native Advertising
The paid placement of media within a mobile or social app, either as an interactive unit conspicuously placed on an app screen or as an interstitial interruption somewhere in the flow of the app. Although in many ways they are similar to Web ads, in-app ads generally operate outside of a browser context, giving them access to certain native platform capabilities at the expense of standardization and interoperability.
Mobile Analytics
Offerings that instrument mobile-optimized Web properties, collect usage data, and provide tools for visualizing patterns, setting and tracking against goals.
Idea Management
Tools that support a structured process for generating, improving and prioritizing insights that would otherwise not have emerged through normal processes.
Social Applications
Developers and tool providers for applications designed to run in social environments such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn
Marketing Resource Management
Applications that support processes for orchestrating internal and external marketing resources.
Web Analytics
Specialized analytic applications used to understand and improve online channel user experience, visitor acquisition and actions and optimize digital marketing and advertising campaigns. Commercial products offer reporting, segmentation, analytical and performance management, historical storage, and integration with other data sources and processes. The tools are used by marketing professionals, advertisers, content developers and the website's operations team, and they increasingly provide input to automated tools that target improved customer experience.
Product Design
Services for creating digitally enabled offerings that include ideation, specification, prototyping and user experience design.
User Experience Management
The discipline associated with designing and implementing user-centric customer experiences that are conducive to business objectives such customer acquisition, support, satisfaction and advocacy.
Commerce
Transaction or value exchanges such as a shopping experience or content-based buying opportunity.
Mobility
Programs tasked with assuring that consumers have access to relevant digital marketing services and offers in any context at any time or place.
Smart Kiosks
An interactive appliance, usually in a public place, that uses advanced techniques such as vision sensing to recognize facts about a user (such as age and gender), so that it can deliver more appropriate information.
Geotargeting
Services that allow advertisers and marketers to target users by location, either by using an IP lookup service, device-based GPS or cell tower triangulation techniques.
Programmatic TV Advertising
The application of real-time digital automation and algorithmic techniques to the sale, specification, delivery and insertion of commercials into TV shows.
Marketing Service Providers
Firms that supply professional services, including business process outsourcing, system integration, creative services, application development, hosting, and third-party data and digital marketing services.
Lead Management
Processes that take in unqualified contacts and opportunities from a variety of sources, including Web registration pages, email marketing, multichannel campaigns, third-party leased lists, and social media. The output of lead management processes is qualified, scored, and prioritized selling opportunities to be handed off to direct, indirect or e-commerce sales channels for action and closure.
Marketing Management
Business processes and tools associated with the execution of marketing programs and the administration of marketing resources and activities.
User Groups
Loyal enthusiasts who form brand- or product-focused communities.
IT Service Providers
Companies that offer professional integration services and infrastructure as a service, increasingly used in digital marketing.
Mobile App Marketplace
A hosted collection of free and for-sale downloadable mobile applications (apps) that connect buyers with sellers, provide a repository for metadata, reviews and ratings and manage transactions, app updates and app life cycle.
Geofencing
Tools used to create a virtual space or perimeter for a real-world physical location, such as the one square mile around a store or mall or a 100-yard radius around a store or facility
Management Consultants
Consulting firms that provide strategic advice to enterprises. Management consultants are branching into digital marketing strategy and analysis.
Mobile
Communication, applications and activities enabled by a class of wireless devices that include handhelds (typically smartphones and feature phones), tablets and other highly portable computers.
Social Ops
The creation and maintenance of dialogues with customers and the public through social channels to cultivate beneficial relationships, protect and enhance brand reputation, and distribute engaging content and offers through social media.
Social Commerce
A discipline that uses interactions of potential buyers and their behavior with one another on social networks to identify opportunities for brand engagement and direct sales. Social networking sites have been shown to be good marketing environments if they are used to blend in with the social experience, versus interrupting it.
Over-the-Top Video Services
The delivery of content using broadband infrastructure to bypass a TV service provider's managed content service (specifically, its lineup of broadcast and cable channels). These services can deliver high-quality video and ads to TV screens and players via online distribution.
Consumer 3D Printing
An additive technique that uses a device to create physical objects from digital model, whose costs have decreased to a level that broadens the appeal to a wide range of businesses, schools and consumers.
Responsive Design
The application of technology and techniques to help optimize user experiences across Web and mobile channels for easy rendering, reading and manipulation.
Social TV Enablers
Platforms that support the development of second-screen apps and other enhancements to TV programming and advertising that digital marketers can use to promote engagement with televised content in social media
Advocacy Marketing
A discipline for activating a brand's advocates with unprecedented scale over the social Web. When advocacy marketing is enabled with digital techniques and advocate stories, then endorsements and recommendations are amplified to potentially millions of people, given the exponential nature of social networks. Advocacy marketing has been used effectively to acquire new customers but is now actively being used in loyalty and retention initiatives.
Video Ad Networks
Marketplaces where advertisers can buy and manage inventory for video ads
Digital Asset Management
An application and searchable repository for creative elements, such as graphics, photography, video and audio clips, animation, interactive elements and custom fonts, that supports Web content management and app development systems.
Mobile Commerce
The delivery of digital commerce transactions via mobile device (e.g., purchasing a product from a retailer or purchasing tickets to a concert via a smartphone or feature phone). The most prevalent channels for mobile commerce include mobile apps and mobile-optimized websites.
Mobile Apps and Content Services
Commercial developers of native mobile applications, content and services.
Mobile Ad Networks
Services that provide advertisers access to mobile advertising inventory slots on an aggregated group of mobile media opportunities (in-app inventory, mobile websites, online video, apps and widgets) with various forms of targeting.
Online Ad Networks
Aggregators of digital ad inventory, predominantly display, that act as brokers for buyers and sellers, often through seats on real-time ad exchanges. They are often specialized for performance, behavior or vertical markets.
Social Analytics
The monitoring, analysis, measurement and interpretation of digital interactions and engagement with people, topics, ideas and content in social communications. It includes sentiment analysis, natural-language processing and social networking analysis (influencer identification, profiling, scoring and analysis), predictive modeling and recommendations, and automated identification and classification of subject/topic, people or content.
Marketing Analytics
Services that analyze marketing data to reveal performance and opportunities across channels and audience segments.
In-Game Advertising
Ads placed in social and mobile apps as well as traditional games.
Product Placement and Embedded Merchandising
Tools and techniques for the dynamic rendering of signage, logos and product images and models in audiovisual media.
Multitouch Attribution
An advanced analytical technique, supported by a specialized class of vendors, that tracks individuals across multiple channels, registers exposure to marketing messages, and links that exposure to a desired outcome, such as a sale. The result is a model estimating the actual impact of channels, campaigns and specific messages on goals.
Digital Retailers
Companies that sell products on the Web and may also sell data and targeted promotional opportunities.
Marketing Ops
The management and operation of marketing platforms and applications, including campaign, lead, loyalty, event, performance and marketing resource management systems and processes. Marketing operations span the gap between digital and traditional marketing channels.
Emotion Detection
Emotion detection is a technology allowing advertisers and agencies to know how consumers react to ad exposures
Social Marketing Management
Tools, templates and online services that enable the creation, maintenance and optimization of a branded presence in social networks and social media.
Social Search
A style of Web search that uses elements of a user's social behavior; such as places
visited, likes/dislikes, favorites, recent activities and conversations, to improve the results of searches inside and outside enterprises. Such elements are typically stored as metadata, making social search a type of metadata mining. It also enables users to disambiguate results from their queries more effectively.
Web Ops
The management of the organization's owned media assets, including its website, apps, and social media pages. Responsible for deployment, maintenance, hosting, performance, security and analysis of site and related activity.
Product Search
A searchable index of commercial product information, including merchandise images, specifications, pricing and availability information.
Design
The creation of styles and creative assets, such as web pages, imagery, video clips, apps and message copy that capture attention and express a brand's values and personality while communicating information, ideas and offers.
Digital Wallet
A storage place of secure information necessary to authenticate a user and initiate an authorization process to make a transaction to purchase goods and services.
Data Ops
The hub for collecting and distributing data, with a mandate to provide controlled access to systems of record for customer and marketing performance data while protecting privacy, usage restrictions and data integrity.
Consumer Data and Targeting Services
Providers of demographic, behavioral, and contextual data about consumers (including business targets), usually supplied anonymously in the context of acquiring a desired audience.
Search Engines
Search engines index the global Web (or some subset) and direct users to websites based on queries.
Site Retargeting
Services that use ads, email and social media to win back users who have abandoned shopping carts or otherwise failed to complete a transaction on a website.
Dynamic Creative Optimization
Technologies that allow creative elements of an ad unit or website, such as images and copy, to be dynamically selected in real-time based on variable parameters such as viewer segmentation (geography, demographics, behavior), context (device, location, status), or conditions (weather, time-of-day, inventory levels).
Strategy
The aspect of business strategy concerned with understanding market opportunities, cultivating markets and customers, and generating awareness and demand for products and services.
Mobile Payments
Transactions conducted using a mobile phone and payment instruments that include banking instruments such as cash, bank account or debit/credit card, and
stored value accounts (SVAs) such as transport card, gift card, Paypal or mobile wallet.
Multichannel Campaign Management
A process as well as software and services that enable companies to plan, design, launch, manage and measure marketing programs targeted at specific customer segments across a multichannel environment.
Social Ad Management
Services to optimize social advertising across networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google.
Creative
Services and tools that support the process of designing marketing programs and elements, from idea through execution.
Predictive Campaign Analytics
Predictive models (based on analysis of historical patterns, relationships and behaviors) that score the propensity to respond to a marketing campaign.
Microsensors and The Internet of Things
Tiny electronic devices that detect information about their environment such as temperature, movement, proximity or location. They enable the Internet of Things, which consists of networks of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and interact with one another.
Agency Holding Companies
Owners and managers of global agency portfolios.
Personalization
Software that applies context, including knowledge about a user and his circumstances, to select content and offers that will maximize conversion.
Mobile App Analytics
Services that optimize the performance of mobile apps based on insights gained from usage metrics and sentiment.
Automatic Content Recognition
Software and services that enable an application (typically a smartphone, tablet, or Smart TV application) to identify a content element within its proximity - audio, video or image. It is based on sampling a portion of the element, processing the sample to derive a fingerprint or detect a watermark, and comparing the result with a source service that manages such identifiers for a broad collection of content.
Crowdsourcing
The processes for sourcing a task or challenge to a broad, distributed set of contributors using the Web and social collaboration techniques. Crowdsourcing applications typically include mechanisms to attract the desired participants, stimulate relevant contributions, and select winning ideas or solutions.
QR Codes
Two-dimensional bar codes that are readable by mobile phones and computer cameras and that trigger the device's browser to go to a particular URL.
Digital Offers
Communications from daily deal sites and aggregators, flash sale sites, group buying sites, social media sites, corporate websites, and related time promotions that can be redeemed through both online and offline channels.
Product Reviews and Recommendations
Services and applications providing aggregated product reviews and recommendations to support e-commerce shopping experiences.
Digital Marketing Hub
A digital marketing hub provides marketers and applications with standardized access to audience profile data, content, workflow elements, messaging and common analytic functions for orchestrating and optimizing multichannel campaigns, conversations, experiences, and data collection across online and offline channels, both manually and programmatically.
It typically includes a bundle of native marketing applications and capabilities, but it is extensible through published services with which certified partners can integrate.
Real-Time Data
Data and analytic services that can be delivered on demand in real time to marketers to assist in both programmatic and rapid-response decision making.
Mobile Search
A specialized application, primarily voice-activated, that adapts search results for the context of mobile users.
Digital Agencies
Digital marketing agencies are creatively led professional services firms that help marketing executives manage a more effective marketing mix. Modern agencies combine traditional creative competencies with digital technologies to help marketers compete with a more data-driven customer experience, informed by greater insight through mobile, social, and analytics. Once dominated by communications and promotional activities, leading agencies today help explore new sources of growth, including market diversification, and product ideation and development. Leaders are increasing investing in business transformation consulting skills to help extend core businesses into the digital world.
Online Data Exchanges
Web-based marketplaces that enable members to buy and sell consumer data that can be associated with ad media through an identifier such as a cookie ID. Such data is intended to boost targeting effectiveness for digital advertising, predominantly Web display ads. Recently, terms such as "data marketplace" and "data aggregators" have begun to replace "data exchange."
Analytics
The discovery and evaluation of meaningful patterns in data, often through a solution to address specific business issues rather than generic business intelligence tools.
Augmented Reality
The integration of physical environments with digital techniques, often in real time, to enhance user decision making while interacting with a physical environment. Enhancements overlay elements such as descriptive text, graphics, audio and other virtual enhancements. It is this "real-world" element that differentiates AR from virtual reality. AR integrates and adds value to the user's interaction with the real world, versus a simulation
Ad Tech
Technology for managing advertisements across channels, including search, display, video, mobile and social, with functions for targeting, design, bid-management, analytics, optimization and automation of digital advertising.
Persona Management
The nascent class of tools that helps people keep track of and communicate what they are saying in the context in which they are saying it while participating in multiple social communities.
Ad Ops
The management of investments in paid media, which includes search, display and video across online, mobile and social destinations, and the use of programmatic techniques to measure and optimize advertising.
Privacy Compliance
Tools and disciplines to ensure that any data collected from websites, social presence, apps, advertising or third parties conforms to regional privacy laws and norms
Virtual Actors
Lifelike human figures, whose image and voice are synthetic, based on computer imagery and sound, that could act as virtual sales and service personnel while bringing to life a brand's image and personality.
Search
Technology for finding relevant content on websites and displaying results in easy-to-use formats. Search engines supply the lion's share of traffic to websites and claim the largest share of digital advertising spending.
Venues
Public or semi-public places, whether physical or virtual, that offer opportunities to interact digitally with customers.
Statistical Identification and Location Profiling
Technologies that enable mobile, Web and app services to identify a device by extracting characteristics that are persistent and unique to that device; they are used for ad and service targeting, analytics, and fraud detection.
Social
Environments, applications, technologies, businesses and cultures that focus on interpersonal communication and community enablement.
Blogging Platforms
Broadcast-style communications systems that enable authors to publish articles, opinions or product reviews (known as posts), which can be delivered through stand-alone websites, email, feed syndications systems and social networks. Blogging platforms also enable direct reader participation with the host blogger or with other blog participants by enabling user comments.
Search Retargeting
Services that use information about consumer search queries to target users who have demonstrated interest in a category with ads and offers outside of the search results.
Data Warehouses
Storage architectures to hold data extracted from transaction systems, operational data stores and external sources to supply systems such as marketing analytics.
Ad Verification Services
Offerings that ensure ads are visible and running in safe contexts and that contracts are being fulfilled. They can also address compliance with privacy regulations.
Census and Panel Data
Demographics and private survey-based data and general market data, gathered by research companies, used to analyze the habits and preferences of consumers.
Web Content Management
Commercial, open-source and hosted applications, based on a core repository, that control content to be consumed over one or more online channels.
Social Networks
Online websites, such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, that provide open or private membership in which people share information.
E-Commerce Enablers
Products and services for creating engaging commerce experiences to drive transactions. They typically include customizable shopping carts, storefronts, merchandising tools, and social features.
Program
Social Advertising Mgmt
Content Marketing
E-Commerce
Connection to CMO
Idea Mgmt
Campaign
Search
Connection to IT
IT Service
Geotargeting
Microlocation
Data
Connections to
Connections to
Mobile Search
Responsive Design
Mobile Apps & Content
Mobile Commerce
Mobile App
SEO Tools
Attribution
DMP
Programmatic Media
Social Advertising Mgmt
Email
Media
User Groups
Advanced
Social Applications
Developers and tool providers for applications designed to run in social environments such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn