Advances in technology have transformed the advertising space in several ways. From traditional advertising which involved RFPs, human negotiations, and manual error-prone processes, the business world is now making use of modern software for digital advertising.
Programmatic Marketing aims to make the ad buying process more efficient and cheaper, eliminating the chances of error wherever possible. In 2019, programmatic ad spending is exceed $60 billion, in the US alone.
By automating some of the mundane everyday tasks in the cycle, programmatic marketing enables agencies and brands to devote more time to planning strategies and optimizing campaigns, instead of getting bogged down by auctions, impressions, errors, and bureaucracy.
However, when it comes to programmatic marketing, publishers are from Mars and advertisers are from Venus: both look at programmatic very differently. While advertisers are benefiting from the technology in numerous ways, publishers are often still sticking to traditional advertising models and methods. The result? A large portion of publishers’ time is spent on devising ads but less on creating value.
What Programmatic Marketing means to publishers
More revenue. Faster growth. Stronger market standing.
As programmatic captures a growing share of the digital advertising pie, publishers are looking for ways to benefit with revenue gains and a stronger market position. Although programmatic has a lot to offer, in the publishing world, publishers are still sticking to traditional advertising models to offer consistent propositions and pricing via each channel.
Even as the lines between traditional and programmatic marketing blur, publishers experience many inefficiencies across the programmatic value chain. This includes a low level of understanding, lack of insights, difficulty in generating impact, miscommunication, poor quality of ads, little or no optimization testing, and lack of visibility, among others.
But despite these challenges, programmatic can help publishers drive substantial gains by:
- Basing advertising strategies on programmatic sales to boost revenue and profitability
- Deploying technology to operate more efficiently, increase revenue and margins, and outperform the market while achieving a larger share of sales.
- Using a cross-channel data-driven strategy and tailoring it to suit market position and dynamics.
- Removing inefficiencies and freeing up staff to focus on maximizing revenue and realizing value – faster and more efficiently.
- Spending fewer hours on monitoring, reporting, billing, and review and more on value-creating activities.
- Aligning advertisers with the audiences they want to reach, allowing them to target the right consumers in innovative ways.
- Developing the right capabilities and realigning the organization and incentives to support revenue goals.
- Understanding the impact of various offerings, configurations and bidding criteria, and using the data to feed new propositions to sales teams.
- Analyzing bidding and up-selling data and using it to advise advertisers on creative bidding strategies.
How advertisers look at Programmatic Marketing
As consumers become more and more demanding, the rules of engagement are evolving. Advertisers are turning to programmatic to reach audiences wherever they are. They want to deliver highly relevant, effective, and measurable ads—at scale.
Since great advertising begins and ends with the consumers, programmatic allows advertisers to organize their data in such a way that they can make the right connections with their audience.
Using programmatic marketing, advertisers can unearth critical audience insights, design compelling digital advertisements, execute strategies with precision, reach consumers across markets and platforms, and measure the impact for continuous optimization.
Here’s how advertisers are using programmatic:
- Aggregating digital and offline data sources to gain a 360-degree view of consumer engagement.
- Gathering audience interactions across several touch points to learn what’s working and what’s not, for better results.
- Using a single technology platform to deliver seamless, consistent, cross-channel experiences to consumers and make audience insights more valuable and actionable.
- Tailoring advertising messages to the specific needs of audiences and touching them with the right message at the right moment.
- Streamlining campaign planning to analyze past advertising campaigns to drive better results based on what has worked well historically.
- Creating compelling messages to engage audiences across channels, screens, and devices.
- Building personal and logical ad creatives to ensure every ad is compelling for the context in which it is served.
- Understanding which audience touch points are most likely to translate to action and driving efforts towards value-creating activities.
The future of digital marketing
In a fast-evolving market, it is important to stay close to the audience and anticipate their changing needs. While advertisers have quickly warmed up to the potential of programmatic to deliver relevant ads to customers, at the most opportune time, publishers have been slower to change.
However, if publishers do not see the programmatic light soon, they run the risk of becoming irrelevant to their audience. By assembling the right ad technology stack, it’s time for publishers to embrace programmatic to maximize revenue and margins by meeting the needs of their consumers quickly. Digital markets, marketers, and strategies vary in their maturity levels. But publishers and advertisers alike should make programmatic advertising central to the future of digital advertising – across formats and platforms. It’s the future and it’s now.
