Programmatic previously took a back seat in media buying but now it is very much in the driving seat and leading the way to effective audience engagement. But how did programmatic become key to greater marketing success? Many are still grappling with this question rather than reaping the rewards; a recent survey from Appnexus, IAB Europe and WARC found that 25% of marketers had not heard of programmatic. They’re missing out on a key marketing development as programmatic trading uses anonymous data to intelligently target consumers at the individual level, providing an efficient way to optimise campaigns towards specific outcomes and to develop more complex marketing strategies.
In the dawn of programmatic, this new technique for specific audience buying was used for lower quality inventory but as adoption by premium publishers has progressed, so too has the inventory quality. Confusingly, programmatic and RTB (Real Time Bidding) have also often been conflated when they are in fact two separate things. Programmatic in its simplest form is actually the automation of media buying and the usage of data on an impression per impression basis to optimise the process, while RTB - the auctioning off of specific individual impressions in real time to the highest bidder - is just one type of programmatic buying available. Today, programmatic is used for all types of digital media, across all channels and inventory sources.
Programmatic is in fact the most promising way to achieve the long sought after marketing ideal of having your message reaching the right person, in the right place and at the right time. The media or content has traditionally been the proxy to target an online audience, mirroring offline. In the past advertisers wanting to reach females online would perhaps target a cookery site – while in reality the site’s readership might be 30% male. Programmatic offers an alternative to using content as a proxy for audience, as it uses anonymous data that allows impression-level targeting, i.e. individual audience buying in real time.
The game changer here is the use of data management platforms (DMPs) that allow advertisers to see online user's activity across the entire scope of addressable media. DMPs can process and analyse thousands of data points to create rich anonymous online visitor portraits giving advertisers deeper insight into digital audiences.
In practice, this significantly impacts how media is bought. If for example, you were selling luxury cars, you might previously have sought placements in The Telegraph motoring section – media that comes at a premium. While that approach is still valid, the DMP can instead identify an audience of appropriately high-net-worth individuals exhibiting an interest in motoring and that are reachable elsewhere online – potentially while they are checking the weather or local news. The site they're on, the content they’re consuming, and the device they're using is immaterial – the ad is delivered based on online behaviour shown rather than on what the user happens to be doing at a particular moment.
In programmatic buying’s automated transactions, data is vital – the more you know about an available impression the better able you are to judge how relevant and valuable it is to your campaign. Furthermore, with concerns such as brand safety, and viewability, the more that can be understood about the context of that impression the better, hence the profusion of solutions on the market to address those concerns and the move towards private marketplaces.
As publishers continue to further adopt programmatic trading across more premium inventory and additional channels and formats, companies are increasingly using private marketplaces to maintain mutually advantageous relationships with publishers, incorporating not only premium display inventory, but rising star formats, native, mobile, video and more, ensuring that all branding objectives can be fulfilled.
The programmatic audience buying model therefore helps brands cut out some of the inherent waste of using content to guide buying while optimising the efficiency of campaigns in qualitative and brand safe environments.
So that's the benefit of programmatic but, in practice, the application can greatly vary. Ultimately, success or failure depends heavily upon three factors that a brand must consider:
1. Quality of the audience profile database
Underpinning any programmatic audience buying solution is its database of audience profiles. More profiles allow for more precise targeting. So instead of targeting 40 year old married men for a life insurance campaign, we can, for example, target 40 year old married men who are in-market shoppers for life insurance or have started researching life insurance online. However, simply having a large number of audience profiles is only half the equation. Effective profiles must also be rigorously accurate and frequently updated based on the aggregation of secure, non-personally identifiable audience information. You also need to check that those audience segments can be activated in real time and across all digital channels.
2. Access to Premium Inventory
Consider how you can programmatically access premium, brand-safe inventory across display, online video, mobile, and social. You need to make sure to work with a partner that has a strong media relationship otherwise, without a critical mass of touch points in a qualitative environment, programmatic loses much of its effectiveness – no matter how good the audiences’ database might be.
3. Solid strategy and experienced approach
The last piece of the puzzle is the human element. Specifically, the expertise of humans choosing which audience profiles to target and how best to action that targeting. Maybe, life insurance ads will be most successful with 40 year old married men who went to university. Or that own a people carrier. Based on what the advertiser is trying to sell, your programmatic partner must be able to identify the most relevant profiles to target and then, when the campaign is running, make adjustments on the fly.
It's important not to lose sight of the fact that while the technology in programmatic is crucially important; it is people behind the technology who are steering the ship. With automation, the human touch – understanding which buttons to push or levers to pull (and in what order) remains critical to designing and implementing successful programmatic marketing campaigns.
By Nicolas Bidon, Managing Director UK at Xaxis.
PrivSec Conferences will bring together leading speakers and experts from privacy and security to deliver compelling content via solo presentations, panel discussions, debates, roundtables and workshops.
For more information on upcoming events, visit the website.
comments powered by Disqus