H Platform → The future of Digital Programmatic Media
So the first question you’re asking if w.t.f. is H Platform? I’ll give you a few seconds to search this.
Have you figured it out yet?
Well good luck if you Googled it because you’re not going to get a straight answer from it either. I guess you just have to read what I have to share :D
H Platform is the newly set up programmatic arm of Havas Media. H Platform essentially combines Programmatic Display capabilities from Affiperf and Programmatic Mobile capabilites from Mobext into 1 platform agnostic unit. This makes great sense, after all the WHOLE is always greater than the SUM of its parts — Aristotle.
(I’m talking about Havas Media Chicago specifically, I’m not 100% sure which other markets have rolled this out)
A device agnostic division also sees the rise of deviceagnostic specialists. You don’t talk mobile or display to these guys, you talk programmatic.
So how is H Platform structured?
You have your Programmatic Strategists and you have your Programmatic Traders.
What kind of support can you expect from H Platform?
a. Strategy & Engagement
The strategist is the champion of programmatic solutions. Their job is to work hand in hand with the media planning team to provide the best programmatic solution for the client. The strategist is also involved in reporting meetings with the client to assist the media team with in-depth questions.
The strategist doesn’t just provide the programmatic strategy and a plan for the brief, they also help to convey the targeting requirements to the traders so that targeting such as ‘people who like to watch Jurassic Park but don’t like lizards’, into media addressable audiences on the trading platform.
This is a very important differentiating factor because they would know the available targeting better than anybody in the planning team and the Strategist would understand the brief requirements better than the trader. So everyone has to work closely together.
b. Trading
The traders’ function here is probably similar across all markets. There are some differences from what I’m used to in Singapore though.
The trading team has a very systematic optimization flow which other markets could learn from. They don’t just do daily pacing optimizations and minimally weekly performance reviews / optimizations. They consolidate a daily internal report so that ALL traders have visibility on ALL campaigns strategies and performance, which allows the leads to easily spot campaigns that need more attention.
They have a mentor / mentee system which ensures that all campaigns have some senior attention, no juniors are left to struggle on their own, and there’s always someone to support learning/problem solving.
The traders here don’t just take orders. They are active contributors to the campaigns and regularly provide suggestions to improve the targeting OR suggests proxies whenever certain targets are just too granular or unique.
In a nut shell, the programmatic team (Strategist + Trader) works very closely with the planning team, everyone has a stake in all the accounts and the success of a campaign, not just the media planning team #teamwork
c. Education (Probably the most important!)
A programmatic board was set up among the North American Havas offices lead out of Chicago. Part of their initiatives includes ensuring the regular education of the agency and clients.
On an agency level they organize learning sessions every 2 weeks where they invite various programmatic vendors to discuss all things programmatic. This is to ensure that everyone, especially the media planning team, is equipped with the necessary knowledge to not only provide the best solution to clients, but drive innovation on an account level. Interestingly 50% of the time is for vendors while 50% is from traders to allow media planners to better understanding set up and strategies from a trader’s perspective.
On the client side of things, the team also does programmatic 101 sessions for all new clients, and at least monthly updates on important happenings that might affect their business. Simpler topics than the agency level sessions of course, its more thought starters which will help drive conversations with the planning team.
d. Client’s programmatic roadmaps
All clients have different levels of digital media requirements depending on the nature of the business and the digital competency of the marketing team.
What H Platform also does, on top of everything else, is plan out the programmatic roadmap for clients on a yearly basis.
The road map reviews what clients have been doing, what they should be doing in the next 12 months, and map out guildelines and milestones that’s bounded to the client’s Quarterly Business Reviews. This works for all clients regardless if they are branding driven (push innovation) or performance driven (push efficiency).
The working process with H Platform is pretty simple
a. Media team to share the brief, targeting, budget
b. Programmatic Strategy team to come back with a programmatic media plan within 3 working days
c. After which the planning team will evaluate the plan against the overall media strategy after which the Programmatic Strategy team will make changes if required
d. Once media planning team has gotten the client’s buy-in, they submit the details into IOMT
e. The Programmatic Strategy team will them pick up the IOMT brief and convey the strategy, targeting and other important details to the traders
f. Traders are then in-charge of making sure the campaign is able to reach the desired audience, regular reporting and optimizations
I’m going to end this write up by sharing a few cool initiatives that the Chicago’s Programmatic Team has done.
№1 — There’s a 50-page programmatic handbook!
This is MY copy. Get your OWN!
№2 — They’ve developed a digital PMP playbook! (US & Canada)
Its a digital dashboard that shows you all the possible PMPs Havas has access to across various verticals, publisher type, ad formats and even deal type.
Its not even released yet but I did get a peek!
Its amazing to see all the initiatives that the Chicago office is pushing. I kind of wish we had something similar back in Singapore but its probably a matter of time that best practices trickle down to the global markets.
Thanks for reading, more fun and serious stuff coming up!
- Chintheman
