The Two Factors In Beating The Programmatic Elephant In The Room
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Firstly, what is the elephant in the room for marketers trying out programmatic advertising of any kind?
Attribution
The Attribution elephant is big and ugly and it sits in every marketing meeting that involves digital advertising. For programmatic it is even more of an elephant and it is even more often ignored.
The odd part of the relationship is that programmatic campaigns can be the hardest to accurately attribute while the growth in programmatic spending shows the industry is pressing on even though the advances in attribution aren’t nearly as dramatic. Yet, programmatic is one type of marketing that would actually benefit the most by proving itself with attributed success.
So why is it still such a tough issue to address?
Factor 1 ) No Standards or Benchmarks
Picture the common situation where a campaign is bought programmatically using seven different media vendors.
You hand pick the best vendors in the vertical you’re focusing on, you build a compelling ideal audience profile and then you set about buying as much of that audience as possible through these seven trusted vendors.
You initially thought the variety in vendors works to your advantage; compare their performances and narrow down your next spend, right?
Nope, not necessarily — this is where we’re handicapped by not having a common way to compare performance, let alone audiences.
You buy a box of Quality Street and you’ve got chocolate. You also buy Celebrations and you’ve got more chocolate. Which gives you more deliciousness for the same price? A logical enough comparison you say. But, they’re not the same deep down inside, not identical. One could be chocolate+toffee while the other is chocolate+coconut. You need an independent measure that applies to both, while accounting for their variations, for a proper comparison.
In this scenario, those of us buying media are comparing chocolates and more often than not we’re relying only on the information given to us by those selling the chocolates — it’s not agnostic and it’s not equal.
So how do we fix this?
“Complex algorithms running regression analysis?” Yeah, possibly.
“Machine learning?” Maybe.
“Big data?!” Just no.
Factor 2 ) Centralising Data & Integrations
The reality is that more people are now rightly focusing on building their artifical bottleneck where the correct metrics pass through, and where the metrics are all the same for everyone.
The problem for us digital boys and girls is that creating this central system requires a hell of a lot of integration between all the fancy tools and touch points.
Before you even begin working from your fancy attribution model of choice, you need the infrastructure in place to build up your accessible repository of audience data. You need to figure out:
- What data do I need to collect?
- Where do I get it?
- How do I get it?
- Where do I put it?
- How do I access it?
- What are the best tools for each stage?
- How do they connect?
- Who’s going to get this all plugged in?
And all this needs to be remembered while working within the context of what you eventually want to get out of campaigns.
Throw outsourcing into this mix and suddenly you really have your work cut out for you. It would be easier to work towards such a project if you plan to control and centralise it all in house, if you have the resource.
It might seem like an elephant, and you might want to keep ignoring it because it’s not your problem yet, but every day you wait to get started that elephant is only getting bigger and bigger.
