Six AdTech Basics for entry-level Marketers

Programmatic buying makes digital advertising more efficient and targeted. In today’s digital landscape, the one goal most marketers strive for is adequate multi-device reach. One where you serve a commercial on all your audience’s devices viz TV, social media, mobile…when they want it and where. But programmatic advertising can feel complicated to new marketers. Whether you plan and execute your digital advertising in-house or with the help of an Agency, you need to keep these 6 basics in mind for your next encounter with adtechOpens a new window :

Six basics of Programmatic Advertising for new marketers:

1: Befriend the data

“The more data marketers have at their fingertips, the more personalized the ads become. That’s really what programmatic over the last few years has really pushed forward. Secondly, programmatic allows you to test, learn and find the content that works best – and it can be done in a far more scalable fashion,” says Aly Nurmohamed, vice president of global publisher strategy at Criteo in an earlier blog on marketing week.

The big benefit of programmatic is the ability to personalize what ads are served up, at scale, using user-friendly automation. To make the right choices, however, you need to know and understand the data. Data-driven insights – at the start and even mid-campaign – can help marketers evaluate what’s working best when and where, the most responsive segments, most active geographiesOpens a new window amid lots more. This then allows marketers to narrow down their strategy and use their advertising dollars most effectively while course correcting in real-time.

This is a change from Traditional ad buying where a buyer must manually agree on a certain number of ads with a publisher before being looped into a contract.

2: Mobile and cookies – know what works where!

It’s no secret that digital marketers must be where their audiences are. And most are mobile, on their mobile. With the heavy consumption of mobile ads, inundating your target’s mobile device is one option. But the behavioral targeting capabilities of programmatic models are usually tied to tracking cookies. When it comes to mobile: the functionalities of cookies are limited. This limitation can cause difficulty to marketers wanting to run campaigns across mobile devices. Unless you plan well enough to ensure this doesn’t prove to be a hiccup given the overall picture by using alternatives like a device’s unique identifier, etc. 

So what can one do? Now the real deal is that most of the engagement in mobile advertising occurs within-applications, the main currency here is not necessarily a cookie but a mobile advertising ID like IDFAOpens a new window or Google Play Advertising IdOpens a new window . These replace and enhance cookies!

3: Beware of: lack of transparency and susceptibility to fraud

Just like there are two parts to every story, here’s one about programmatic buying: Programmatic ads are targeted based on demographics and behavior. This means that brands don’t always know where their ads will appear or who is clicking on them. An increase in automation has led brands to lose this control because it isn’t possible to vet so many sites for each campaign.

What this means is that ads could be being clicked by ‘fake prospects’- either bots or click farms (so advertisers paying per click are paying for a lot of fake ‘clicks’) or the ads are being served up on fraud or irrelevant websites (so advertisers paying for reach are paying for ‘reaching’ inflated numbers on websites they wouldn’t want their brands to be associated with.)

Some brands, such as Channel 4 and L’Oreal, had even started pulling their advertising from platforms like YouTube.

And to add more fuel to this, Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) chief brand officer Marc Pritchard had reached out to the industry (around January of last year) to increase transparency around media buying and viewability.

As a new marketer, knowing about the most common challenges advertisers face when launching a programmatic ad buying campaign can help minimize the potential risks from them – and negotiate better with your Media Agencies.

An interesting infographic over at Invespcro’s blog once shared the following statistics, this could come in handy too!

Major problems marketers face with programmatic advertising

Problem	%age
Multi-device Measurement	57%
Fraud	47%
Ad blocking generally	47%
Ad blocking on smartphone	35%
Privacy issues	18%
Others	16%

4: Get comfortable with the science of attribution

While ad placement matters, programmatic ad buying shouldn’t always be about how many ads go out. While several digital advertisers might think programmatic buying will make it easier to push out ads at the scale at low costs to target audiences, this doesn’t assure quality. All thanks to the abundance of audience and campaign insights that programmatic buying now provides, brands can make smarter decisions than ever before. Understanding the gamut of capabilities that programmatic ad buying can give – such as viewability, digital GRP, organic search lift and attribution modeling can be useful. A dive into these insights can give details on what target audiences did after viewing an ad, perception changes and most importantly, what performed at what cost and what didn’t.

5: Master the art of digital storytelling

In the omnichannel, multi-touchpoint world, the forgotten art of storytelling can help create a memorable brand experience for the prospect. Instead of using adtech for mindless retargeting (which one of us hasn’t been assailed by retargeted ads long after we already bought the dress/shoes/car we were researching?), leverage the opportunity provided by the omnichannel adtech capabilities today by truly immersing yourself in the customer journey and building a brand story and experience that resonates? Use each medium to its strength to tell a different part of the story, and work with your buying agency to help it come alive with intelligent placement across channels and formats. (Did you know, in the US, consumers are known to spend an average of 7.8 hours a day engaging with digital contentOpens a new window ?!).

Once you gather interesting insights on your user behavior (Read: Point 1), think out-of-the-box to engage them at various points of their journey for true personalization at scale.

6: Keeping up with both: innovations and trends

With any upcoming and dynamic technology, suppliers will constantly look at ways to improve the end-user experience and limit glitches as has been the case of adtech suppliers. For newbie marketers still adjusting to the complexities of adtech and programmatic buying though, keeping up with game changers like AI and Blockchain and how they can empower programmatic buying is important. Awareness of the ongoing changes in consumer consumption habits is key to more meaningful strategy. Regulations around privacy, data, and personalization are also worth tracking. Behemoths like Google, Facebook, and off late Pinterest, Amazon, and LinkedIn are constantly doing things to change the programmatic buying dynamics and are worth keeping an eye on as well…

While there’s a lot of work being done by tech vendors to give us the best of this world, use these 6 tips to ace your next programmatic strategy discussion!!