What marketers should know before running programmatic campaigns

Doy Moreau
Aug 8, 2017 · 8 min read

You’ve all read it somewhere, digital is killing TV, programmatic is “disrupting” every digital channel, if you’re not on board the programmatic train you’ll be left behind, and if you’re on board you’re surely doing it wrong! Do me a favour and do a search right now for the term ‘programmatic has killed’ and you’ll see what I mean. It is supposedly responsible for the death of print, creativity, privacy, traditional advertising, and in a hilarious turn of events, the very digital agencies who sold you programmatic in the first place.

Alarmists love pointing the finger at programmatic for the decline of just about everything these days, because it’s brand new, difficult to understand, highly complex, and in a state of constant evolution, like an expanding black hole on a mission to destroy every single media channel in its path. To a certain extent they’re right, not because programmatic has done anything more than it claims to do but because you, the marketer, have stopped trusting yourself and started panicking. You’ve been forced outside your comfort zone by so-called experts pushing many different opinions and agendas that it is nearly impossible to tell right from wrong, and this has rocked your intuition and confidence.

This article attempts to address the question that every marketer has one day faced: how do we as marketers approach programmatic when there is little formal training available and the programmatic landscape is in a constant state of evolution?

The good news is that there is no reason to be alarmed, consumer behaviour hasn’t changed overnight, and neither has media consumption. Customers haven’t woken up one day and decided that they were going to only accept post-it sized digital boxes of advertising on their phones and computers and actively ignore every other message thrown at them. We are after all still human beings, have not (yet) migrated our consciousness into cyberspace, and are still receptive to messages in the real world.

In this article I won’t be defining what programmatic is or how it works. Wikipedia will give you an in-depth look at what Real-Time Bidding or Demand-Side Platforms are and how programmatic works, and by the time this goes live those articles will have been updated with the latest technology developments by a plethora of crowdsourced editors, something that I can’t guarantee as an individual. Also, I’ll be touching primarily on Display Advertising, as ultimately everything including TV and radio will be bought programmatically, but that deserves a completely different point of view.

Rather I want to give you a series of basic questions to ask yourself when you’re faced with the task of briefing a media plan out to your agency.

Should you be doing programmatic display at all?

Too often clients will get excited at the prospect of “doing something new” and will allocate a disproportionately large portion of their multi-channel mix to programmatic display advertising. As a general rule, it should never be the first point of contact with your brand, and should absolutely not be used as the only awareness-generating tool for new brands.

After all, recall of programmatic display campaigns is still low, and average viewability rates are hovering around the 50% mark (meaning one out of two customers will not see your ad for more than 2 seconds because they scrolled past it, or it was served below the fold). Ask yourself what the last TV ad was that you remember? It may have been annoying or repetitive, but you surely do remember it. Then ask yourself what the last display ad is that you remember. Having trouble?

Instead, take a step back and ask yourself what actions you want customers to take, and what message you want them to take away from the campaign. If that message is a brand message only with no call to action, it may be wise to invest in channels that will provide more engagement time with your message such as video/TV, content marketing, PR, or even out-of-home first. Programmatic will then serve as a post-it sized reminder of your brand message, served at the right time and place to influence a customer’s purchase decision.

However if you’re an established brand with strong awareness and media presence, and are running an online promotion where customers need to be directed to your website to take immediate action, you’ll want to invest a much larger proportion of your budget into programmatic, and activate a retargeting campaign.

To illustrate this, say you’re a fast food restaurant chain. It makes sense for you to use programmatic to, for example, drive foot traffic at lunchtime by geo-targeting CBD office workers between 11am and 2pm on weekdays, as this is when they are likely to decide on lunch. However, doing so for dinner time may be counterproductive. Instead, consider family-oriented radio ads while the workers drive home, or digital out-of-home in lifts or public transport promoting take-away. It is likely to be more memorable than targeting their workstations just before they’re about to log off and are on their way out.

Perhaps you’re a mid-sized business developing organic supplements to drive a variety of health benefits and what you need to do is inform customers of the benefits of your product, but your budgets are limited and can’t afford a television ads and product placement. Programmatic display isn’t going to help you much here. Build a lean online strategy instead that is heavy on video and content marketing, where you can grasp the customer’s attention and clearly walk them through how you can bring positive change into their lives.

On the other hand, you might be an electronics retailer that is aiming to drive sales through online channels. You’ve just launched a “20% off” promotion for a limited time, you’ll want consumers to jump on that and take action within seconds or minutes of them having seen your display ad. An hour later they are less likely to remember your offer, because they’ll have been hit with other messages meanwhile. Always remember, customers aren’t marketers, they don’t care about or remember your brand as much as you think they do.

In this scenario, if customers have gotten as far as your website but haven’t completed their online purchase, you know what to do: hit them with retargeting, hard. They’re in-market for your product and are probably shopping around, checking reviews, discussing with family members, and you risk losing them if they aren’t regularly reminded that your offer still stands, otherwise another brand will.

Do me a favour though and instruct your agency of the following: unless you’re trying to up-sell a different product, customers should not be retargeted past the point of purchase. You’re causing frustration on the part of the consumer and risk damaging your brand. Think back to the last time you bought an item online and the retailer kept retargeting that same item to you for weeks after you bought it? Or worse, it went on sale for less than the customer bought it in the first place, and you’ve now created dissatisfaction with a satisfied customer.

Are you briefing your agency correctly?

As a marketer you know your customers well, and programmatic is a great way to target customers using data, but programmatic data comes in the shape of cookies on people’s devices, and those cookies aren’t going to tell you your customer demographic, instead it will tell you how these customers behave.

Say you’re a luxury hotel brand selling weekend inventory to discerning travellers who are 35–54 years old, are in upper socio-economic circles, and who are corporate executives. Try and rewire your brain and dive into analytics to translate the above demographics into online behaviours instead. What you will come up with could be a few extra briefing points that will be relevant in matching data sources to your campaign:

  • You know from check-in data that customers tend to be credit card holders, with high incidence of premium credit cards. 3rd party data can be added to your campaign to exclude non-credit card holders from the campaign, and add a premium segment to which you can target higher room categories
  • You know your target consumes financial and news websites, but from your website analytics you notice you get a lot of referrals from sports or lifestyle website. This indicates that customers are more receptive to messages about traveling when they aren’t consuming business news
  • Your analytics show that your customers generate a lot of traffic on weekends on tablets, and less on weekdays from desktop computers, yet you generate more bookings on Monday afternoons than any other day. It is likely that they research the product on weekends, but purchase on Mondays after discussing options with partners or families on the weekend. This will be helpful in planning how the campaign will be delivered

This is the type of targeting information that should go into your agency brief, and they are way more important than your demographics. In the process you may unknowingly end up broadening your market to 25–34 year olds who you thought weren’t your target market, but are more inclined to spend and are demonstrating behaviours similar to an older age group.

Are you micro-managing your agency?

I get it, programmatic is technologically sexy, somewhat intriguing or exciting, and you’ve been given access to a wealth of real-time data to monitor campaign performance. There is going to be the temptation to analyse and control every single aspect of the campaign but I ask of you one thing: please let the agency do its job!

Yes, programmatic is a simplified way of trading media for digital campaigns, but that does not mean it does not require continuous campaign management from agency traders, who are constantly testing and optimising your campaign to achieve your conversion objectives. Getting on the phone with them daily because today’s CTR% on one of the sets of banners is lower than the other and you’d like to shift budgets to the better performing creative, is only going to take up valuable time that should be spent adjusting other parameters - like sourcing and managing 3rd party data lists - that actually matter.

If you’re wanting to help out, provide a daily feed of data that your agency does not have access to, like actions taken on the website, loyalty data, in-store traffic, product reviews, and anything else you may be reporting to your management, but haven’t passed on to your agency.

Thank you for reading this. Hopefully this article will help you make sense of what your next move should be when it comes to programmatic, and will give you some more confidence in taking or questioning the advice you are getting from your agency, DSP’s, 3rd party data providers or other consultants.

Perhaps a final word about who wrote this article: I am an independent media strategist based in Melbourne, Australia. I have 16 years of experience on both the client and agency side across market research, product management, marketing consulting, digital media, and previously held a senior strategy role in a digital agency specialised in programmatic. This does not necessarily make me an academic expert, but I’ve always asked the right questions and enjoy getting to the bottom of things. Now I’d like to make it my mission to pass this knowledge on to you.

Doy Moreau

Doy Moreau

Written by

Independent Media Strategist with Solid Digital Experience

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