It’s clear programmatic advertising is on the rise; however, there’s still progress to be made. Irfon Watkins, CEO of Coull, offers four tips to help you get your head round this form of advertising
When it comes to programmatic, some publishers have been extremely successfully. But it has not been as simple as plug-and-play for everyone. The great hope of programmatic is that it can bring efficiency to advertising, enabling publishers to realise the full value of their inventory in an automated way and allow advertisers to reach highly targeted audiences at scale. However, it’s clear that while progress has been made, we’re not quite there yet.
One reason why publishers have been slow to adopt programmatic is because a big misunderstanding about its value in the industry. Programmatic trading is still in its early days – publishers are screaming out to be educated, and the programmatic adtech space is full of vendors with imperceptible differences in their value proposition. On the other end, there are the publishers who are trying to fit programmatic into their legacy infrastructure and are finding it problematic because integration is both costly and time consuming.
Agencies are also skilling up to position themselves for this new media age, with the IPA revealing 90 per cent of all display advertising is controlled by agencies that have an inherent investment in programmatic. If you’re not investing in programmatic to respond to that, are you losing out on up to 90 per cent of potential spend and writing yourself out of plans?
Despite a growing maturity and increased understanding in programmatic, there is still progress to be made. Here are four tips to help you understand how programmatic works:
1. Understand that programmatic can be problematic
Programmatic trading is still in its infancy. Publishers who are trying to fit programmatic into their legacy infrastructure find it problematic because the cost-base and the processes are difficult for them. However next generation publishers, such as Anyclip or NDN, who never had a direct sales teams, love it. Skilling up the sales team within publishing houses to be consultative around programmatic is a vital step to providing a better service to advertisers.
2. Realise the opportunities
The value of programmatic trading lies in the fact that by exposing more layers of data about inventory, advertisers can make more informed buying decisions and do it at scale. Understanding the context of inventory and exposing the information to buyers on an impression-by-impression basis enables contextually relevant ads to be delivered to their target audience. This improves the effectiveness of each ad, resulting in greater brand uplift and engagement. Advertisers will naturally pay more for this, which means increased revenue for publishers.
3. Don’t forget the data
Big data remains a buzzword of digital marketing. The weakness of the term is that it suggests data is valuable in its own right. It’s not. Data is an inert resource and its value can only be unlocked by a combination of technology and people. The role of data analysis is becoming increasingly important on both the publisher and advertiser sides. Both sit on hugely valuable repositories of data that when mined effectively can shape editorial strategies, enable personalised marketing campaigns, and foster efficiencies and ROI in programmatic advertising.
Within the marketing industry, we have trouble leveraging data effectively. And programmatic trading without relevant data adds little value. Data is the key to programmatic and it should be the goal of ad tech companies to do a better job of exposing and indexing that data. Understanding how long videos are viewed and engagement rates, is the type of data needed to better inform the ad buyer and to ultimately drive prices up for publishers.
4. Be aware of viewability issues and industry standards
The reality is that we’ve not yet reached an approved standard for viewability. As the debate around viewability plays out in the industry, marketers must do all they can to maximise the visibility of their online video ads. One way to do this is by integrating contextual advertisements into the video content itself. In this way, instead of trying to distract customers from the content they want to view in order to engage with them, ads will support their content experiences by providing a natural next step to a relevant brand or product.
In a similar vein, users are also much more likely to view and engage with an online video ad when it’s both useful and timely. Therefore ads that deliver a contextual experience that enhances the content by giving viewers information they actually want, when they want it, will prove far more appealing. If marketers truly want to see ROI, they need to ensure customers both see and engage with their online video ads. The way to do this is to pay close attention to viewing figures and to make ads as relevant as possible.
Technology moves at such a rapid pace that often, by the time standards have been agreed, the game has changed. There’s no single terminology standard that will fix this problem and this is where data and trust comes in. The more data you give to advertisers, the more they can make informed buying decisions. The assumption by advertisers on a blind decision is that the inventory being sold to them is not very valuable. Having viewability as a new metric will ensure advertisers don’t waste a huge proportion of their online advertising budget on branding and marketing messages that are not, in fact, reaching their desired audience.
