When it comes to marketing and advertising, audience relevance is imperative. This is particularly the case in online advertising, where some marketers are even prepared to pay more to deliver their ads to the right audiences than they do for the advertising space itself!

However, when it comes to the quality of data advertisers use to target relevant audiences and the actual results there is a huge disjunct. Data is everywhere, but much of it is nearly worthless: cookie churn is a major issue and discerning audience interests, despite what many privacy advocates would have you believe, can be extremely difficult, even with the oceans of data the Web is producing.

Advertisers often buy targeting data that is far from accurate meaning they are paying extra to reach users that might never be in-market for the products they’re trying to sell.

So, what can advertisers do to rectify this situation and do better programmatic?

It’s all about the first party data

Everyone knows that first-party data is the key to doing targeted advertising well. Compared to third-party, or even second-party data, first-party data tends to be the most efficient as it is unique to the advertiser or client who can at least be assured about the fidelity of the data.

Unfortunately, first party data is often limited in scale - it relies on organisations capturing customers’ personal data through onsite purchases or signing up to gated assets. As such it has historically required a large amount of consumer engagements or transactions to build up a sizeable dataset that is reflective of the wider audience. This kind of activity used to be the preserve of only the most popular of website destinations - invariably media companies with lots of content - but in a world where brands are becoming publishers the opportunity for building a large first party dataset that accurately reflects your audience is more possible than ever before.

Kraft use content metadata to do better programmatic

Kraft Foods Group is a fantastic example of an organisation that has cracked the relevance conundrum. Last year at Content Marketing World, Julie Fleischer (Head of Content, Data, and Media for Kraft Foods Group) took to the stage to explain how the organisation was using content metadata to do more accurate and targeted programmatic advertising.

The digital team methodically ‘tagged’ Kraft’s web content with descriptive metadata which noted each piece of content’s mention of themes, products, people, places and organisations. This was no small feat considering that by the end of the project they had identified nearly 22,000 different attributes discussed within their content. By tagging each piece of content, Kraft was able to build a first party dataset of the evolving interests of its web audience of over 100 million unique visitors over the space of a year.

Fleischer explained that this insight into their web audience meant that Kraft’s content marketing delivers “4x the ROI of their traditional advertising methods”.

Furthermore, Kraft uses the dataset to power targeted programmatic ad buys. Fleischer projected that eventually all of Kraft’s ad budget will be programmatic, and therefore be able to use the data asset they are continually building. This means that Kraft can not only quickly identify new trends, but also target advertising to jump on the growth in interest that they have identified. As she put succinctly, if your content is worth creating, it is worth paying to promote.

If brands adopt a large scale publishing model that attracts a sizeable audience, they are in an advantageous position where they can use content metadata to gain first-party insights into their customer base.

Content marketing yields first party data that is brand-owned and accurate, unlike third- and second-party data. Consequently, the next step is for organisations that are becoming brand publishers to take a leaf out of Kraft’s book and reap the first party rewards afforded by using metadata to power better programmatic.

 

By Andrew Davies, CMO and Co-Founder of idio.

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