Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: October 28, 2024
Twilio Segment has introduced new features and integrations to empower advertisers with greater control and efficiency. Twilio is aiming to help advertisers regain control over ad targeting by leveraging first-party data and streamlining data integration processes. The company’s combination of a focus on ad optimization use cases, delivering value quickly, and leveraging AI-powered automation is designed to help advertisers achieve better results and a stronger overall ROI.
What is Covered in this Article:
- Twilio is focusing on advertising use cases to help drive adoption and use of its Segment CDP product, which is designed to work as part of the overall Twilio platform, as well as with third-party applications and data sources.
- The company has announced several new features designed to help advertising regain more observability and control over adtech operations, including integrations with Google Display, Video 360, and Amazon’s DSP platform.
- Twilio is offering Linked Audiences, a feature that enables the combination of streaming event data with warehouse data for more targeted and effective audiences.
- The company has integrated generative AI via its copilot tool, enabling the creation of custom integrations without requiring coding knowledge.
The News: Twilio Segment’s solutions for advertisers have been updated and improved to further help marketers deliver true omnichannel marketing strategies by leveraging AI to precisely personalize ads at scale and create multi-channel journeys with real-time data. The enhancements are designed to help Twilio position itself as the preferred platform for managing advertising optimization and returning control over audience selection, fine-tuning, and performance measurement and monitoring.
Will Twilio Segment’s Solutions for Advertisers Help Deliver Better Performance?
Analyst Take: Twilio Segment is offering new features and integrations within Segment that are designed to provide advertisers with greater control and efficiency. These features are designed to improve the experience of marketers and advertisers, which Twilio says have been at the mercy of large ad tech platforms that may not provide the targeting, visibility, and control that are often the key to driving successful campaigns.
New Integrations and Capabilities
Twilio Segment has been updated to include a number of new integrations and capabilities.
- Google Display and Video 360 Integration: This integration enables marketers to streamline data flow and optimize ad targeting, utilize creative workspaces, and automate bidding to deliver faster insights, improved collaboration, and better results.
- Amazon Advertising DSP Integration: Twilio Segment users can directly connect to Amazon’s advertising platform for seamless campaigns.
- Conversion APIs: This integration enables precise tracking and measurement of activity on Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Linked Audiences: This feature enables the combination of streaming event data with warehouse data for more targeted and effective audiences.
- AI Capabilities: Twilio Segment has been updated with advanced AI to automate data mapping and integration tasks for increased efficiency with optimizing ad spend and improving return on investment. The platform also supports the following AI enhancements:
- Generative audio, which will create an audience for you based on a natural language prompt.
- AI-powered product recommendations, to help ensure customers are served the right messages at the right time.
According to Twilio, the combination of Segment CDP, Twilio Engage, and CustomerAI enables marketers to advertise effectively by identifying behavior-based audiences via AI-powered
Predictions. These audiences are automatically kept up-to-date, and can be activated across native messaging channels and every major digital ad platform. With access to the widest breadth of digital channels, self service and integrations, advertisers can increase agility and meet their customers’ needs at every step of the journey.
Enabling Segment to Return Control Over Ad Targeting to Advertisers
According to Twilio, many advertisers are concerned that algorithms now dominate advertising and don’t take into account first-party data that can drive better results closely linked to an advertiser’s specific customer base. One of the key advantages of Segment is the ability to ingest and link data from streaming events as well as data held in a data warehouse. Combining the two sources of information together enables the creation of a more detailed and robust audience than can be sent to advertising destinations, such as DSPs, to ensure better targeting and stronger advertising ROI.
Twilio has also been focused on delivering features around instrumentation and observability, which it believes will help improve time to value. One of the key aspects is improving the data integration with data held in warehouses and applications such as CRM, customer support, and ERP systems, so that all relevant data is available. This helps prevent bad customer experiences that can result from ad retargeting when products are out of stock.
Driving Results Quickly and Fast Time to Value
Twilio is focusing on a few key use cases within the advertising market, with ad optimization being a priority. Its sales team is being trained on the company’s ad optimization capabilities so they’re ready to highlight a wide range of around 27 or so sub-use cases that can be implemented quickly. Twilio has set a time-to-value goal of 30 days, and stresses that time-to-value equations are a key reason to use the product, instead of taking a DIY approach.
Moreover, Twilio is highlighting the ability to quickly create custom integrations, using its integrated generative AI copilot, which has been trained on 6,000 functions and essentially are JavaScript code integrations with various partners. This enables custom integrations to be built far more quickly and at less expense than hiring an SI or custom developer to write code from scratch.
All told, Twilio’s focus on the advertising market reflects the renewed focus on advertisers leveraging first-party data to drive greater granularity and personalization, which are key drivers of ad impact and ROI. The enhanced observability, customization, and control features provided by Segment, along with the product’s focus on providing out-of-the-box usability and simple customization likely will help place Twilio on advertisers’ shortlists for adtech solutions.
What to Watch:
- While Twilio has a compelling offering, competitors such as mParticle, BlueConic, Mixpanel, and ActionIQ also offer CDP products with solid functionality and experience working with enterprise customers.
- Twilio must ensure it is able to meet the stated goal of 30 days to deliver value, or customers will quickly lose confidence and trust, making it more difficult to deploy additional use cases and additional Twilio products.
- The company’s use of an AI-driven copilot to quickly build integrations is a great example of how generative AI can be used to significantly reduce complexity and time to value.
You can read more about Twilio’s Linked Audiences here, and check out the various advertising spend sub-use cases here.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Twilio’s RCS Expansion with Data-Driven Benefits
Twilio Is Pioneering the Future of Customer Engagement
Twilio’s AI-Driven Success in Q2 2024-Insights and Outlook
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
