The news that Thomas Cook has launched its first programmatic campaign, using its own data to target the audience in real time, is indicative of how programmatic is being on-boarded by major brands.
At the recent Ad Week Europe there were no prizes for guessing which theme came up again and again.
Programmatic advertising has gone from scary new kid on the block to a ubiquitous part of the landscape and the bottom line of any digital media plan.
The acceleration of the market has been driven by a few factors, notably the surge of mobile and video, agency trading desks providing a trustworthy bridge to help clients make the jump in to automated buying and increased accountability as measurement and viewability tools improve.
By now, the vast majority of digitally led clients are on board with programmatic, but there’s an elephant in the room.
Even when clients ‘get’ programmatic, they’re rarely excited about it.
The digital media industry is driven by technological trends, so much so that there is a tendency to gravitate like magpies from one shiny new tech or data solution to the next, proclaiming it as the silver bullet to solve every marketing brief, before dropping it as soon as the next one comes along.
This is where agencies have a job to do. The success of programmatic relies not solely on upping the spend figures and giving the IAB another headline, but in helping clients see the clear benefits and gains they are paying for.
This is where clients’ first party data comes in. Placing clients’ data at the centre of their programmatic strategy gives them skin in the game; a reason to be interested.
The more we know about a client’s audience, the more informed we should be in the way we speak to them.
Every penny spent on advertising your product to an existing customer is wasted unless you tailor the message accordingly - should they see a message relating to a product upgrade, add on, or a retention incentive?
Likewise, there is huge wastage in tarring every potential new customer with the same brush and trying to “blanket message” them in to submission. Why not serve them a message based on their demographic data, location and propensity to convert?
Using clients' data to inform those messages should be a no-brainer and programmatic allows clients and agencies to segment that data and deliver relevant, meaningful and varied messages to them at a level of scale and efficiency which was not previously possible.
Trading desks buy up 3rd party data by the bucket load from the likes of BlueKai and Experian in order to ensure they can offer the best possible targeting solutions and reach to clients, but only the geekiest of clients will force themselves to get excited about such an intangible targeting solution, at least until it starts to drive meaningful results for their business.
As exciting as programmatic has been for our industry, it’s possible to view the medium as only a small leap from the network buys which ate up significant amounts of digital marketing budgets a few years back and the results it drives haven’t always been a significant upgrade on that outdated model.
The role of the agency does not stop at on-boarding clients to the programmatic world; it should be just the start.
The next stage is to work with clients to share their own data to better inform these buys.
In simple terms, data providers have a pretty good idea of what a brand’s audience looks like and how to reach them, whereas the brand themselves can use the data from their actual on site audience to shape the way it communicates with them and find people of similar profiles across the web.
The merging of first and third party data is crucial in creating meaningful connections with brand audiences, and in proving the worth of programmatic to clients who may quite rightly have been asking ‘so what?’
By Tom Casswell, Account Director at Havas Media International and representative of Havas Media Labs. @TommyCasswell
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