Little book to paid digital media

First in a part of 2. The second one delves into programmatic advertising and the upcoming changes to third party data driven adtech.

Digital, like lot of other marketing, is a lot about channel mix.

5X ROI Hacker, Growth Accelerator, performance marketer, digital evangelist — these are titles I see being generously used as profile titles on LinkedIn. If you are a marketer who hasn’t cut your teeth much, these profiles and their work descriptions can seem a bit daunting. I have had friends managing INR 20 Cr ATL on mainline media throwing their hands up when it came to “digital”, thanks to all the obfuscation. It also allows for digital partners to work in a very sweet silo, where they can inform the “brand people” on need basis.

To be honest, each one of these guys are doing one of the two things on digital:
1. Inbound marketing
2. Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing is outreach through digital channels, usually paid. On the other hand, inbound channels “pull in” audiences with relevant content. For instance, an organic social media post for your brand is inbound marketing. However, on the same social media platform, if you are putting out a paid campaign to reach your target audience, that’d be outbound marketing. This series is not about inbound marketing. To know more about inbound, please head to Hubspot’s inbound marketing resource. I use Hubspot actively for inbound marketing at work, and it is one of the few SAAS products I absolutely vouch for.

Digital is quite like the busy market with a hundred distracting billboards.

Following are the 6 main paid outbound channels that marketers use to reach their audiences. With enough practice, understanding and testing, you can optimise for high ROI on these channels, resulting in lower customer acquisition costs.

1. Display advertising through traditional deals/programmatic
2. Native advertising/Content Discovery through syndication
3. Paid search (Search engine marketing)+ paid meta search
4. Paid social media
5. Content collaborations with publishers (PR, advertorials)
6. Affiliate marketing (Also include — influencer marketing)

In this piece we discuss the big boy of all digital channels — display advertising.

Display advertising through direct deals or programmatic

Just 4 years younger than me, display advertising has been around since 1994, when AT&T bought a small rectangle on hotwired.com. Since then the industry has evolved to now go beyond traditional desktop publishers to include OTTs, mobile apps and to include video, gifs, HTML5 creatives as well. Important for big advertisers with need of high impact around launch, and sustained reach and frequency during season.

Typical deals happen on CPD (cost per day) and CPM (cost per impressions), essentially top funnel metrics. There are also lower funnel metrics that are action oriented — CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action), CPI (cost per install) etc.

As publishers gain more and more data signals into their audiences, these media deals can also have specific asks of audience segmentations. You can request for specific geographies and demographics while signing on the deal.

The main advantages of advertising through direct deals is of control and overview. You are assured of brand safety, you know that your ad is not going to appear next to an unpleasant video or article, since you are aware of the publisher’s history. Also with Google phasing out cookies in couple of years, partnering with publishers (or group of publishers) can help marketers go after parameters like frequency caps, retargeting etc.

If you are a marketer in an SME with low budget, it is unlikely you will have a meeting with the sales team. How do you run your small campaign on a big publisher? A lot of these publishers have come up with smart digital platforms where media planners can buy inventory. Times Internet, India’s largest digital publisher with brands like Times of India, Economic Times does it via Colombia. OTT players like Hotstar similarly have their own platform.

You can test the waters with small campaigns, and gradually tune up your spending as you see success. Familiarise yourself with the kind of ads you can show, as well as the metrics you need to think about.

(Disclaimer — I work for Times Internet)

Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising or programmatic buying — as the name indicates automates the process of buying a display ad. What programmatic advertising enables over direct display deals is the ability to optimise your campaign on the basis of audience (own, third party, google data).

In the simplest of ways (and you will find out it’s not really that simple) — I have Rs 10 lakh to spend on a campaign in a 4 week window, with my objectives well defined. I have some parameters in my mind — age, demo, interests, basis my audience’s understanding. I log into DV 360, Google’s demand side platform meant for programmatic buying. I will set up a campaign (line items) by figuring out audiences, putting creatives, fixing CPM bids, with conversion trackers et all (floodlight tags).

This would make for a nice programmatic ad. Custom affinity “car enthusiasts”. In-market for “car service”

The caveat is sometimes low quality publishers, poor quality ad units — which experienced advertisers resolve by entering into programmatic guaranteed deals or private marketplace deals, that allow you to route programmatic campaigns with publisher/s through tools such as Google DV 360, while leveraging its capabilities and ease of usage.

Here is a fantastic course on optimising DV 360 which I had taken up to understand programmatic optimisation (More from an industry perspective than doing programmatic advertising — since I operate in the adtech world).

Alternatively, I could use many of the programmatic DSPs like Tradedesk, Mediamath, Adobe Advertising Cloud, Appnexus, Colombia etc etc (the world of adtech is swimming in acronyms like DSPs, SSPs, CDPs, DMPs — here is a really old but helpful LinkedIn blog where you can familiarise yourself )

DV 360 vs Google Ads

A lot of beginner digital marketers get confused between DV 360, earlier known as DBM (Doublebid for Managers) and Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords.

If you are a low-budget media spender, and not very proficient on digital — DV 360 is not something you want to get started with.

Using programmatic advertising when you have only run basic display ads on google adwords is equivalent to trying options trading because you have a demat account and bought 5 stocks of Reliance during lockdown (good for you).

In my experience, Google Ads is something most medium-level digital marketers can comfortably navigate, optimise and derive value out of. It is great for dipping your toes with small to medium budgets. Google Ads is a high ROI channel, reaches 80% of internet users in the world, and is fantastic for running cost-optimum CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns that gets billed to advertisers only when user clicks the ad. Two factors determine how your ads will be priced and positioned on Google Adwords - Quality Score, that measures the relevance and quality of the ad, and the bid itself.

On the other hand, DV 360 layers up its optimisation process with first party, google data and even third party data like Bluekai and Lotame for a minor fee. Uses tools like bid multipliers. It is a complex tool that requires expertise in managing bids, audience selection, and I’d suggest you leave it to practitioners in the company (or an external media planning agency).

When use DV 360 above Google Ads?

1. Big budgets, and thus cost optimisation becomes extremely extremely important
2. Use of video inventory or rich HTML 5 ads. DV 360 has access to 90+ ad exchanges beyond
3. Use of dynamic creatives (that mark the user’s journey)
4. More CPM, less CPC (Others may disagree)
5. Granular frequency caps (like once per hour per user agent)

Here is a quick video to familiarise yourself with programmatic advertising. There is a lot more about programmatic advertising iI need to talk about, which I will do in the subsequent posts.

In next post — I will discuss programmatic advertising a bit more in depth, and will talk about native advertising as wll.

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I am writing on this subject for the first time, hoping to share what I know succinctly (as much as possible). Please do share questions or doubts. I am available to answer emails related to digital marketing, adtech, B2B marketing on nathshaonli@gmail.com

My linkedin is — https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaonli-nath-0b60a630/