30 March, 2015

Is Programmatic Advertising Across Mobile Impactful?

By Midu Chandra

We all know that mobile is big, says Midu Chandra, one of the co-founders of marketing and technology consultancy mobiDdiction. The reality is that within this financial year most Australian publishers will see more traffic coming from mobile than from desktop.

Knowing that the audience is on mobile, can programmatic buying via mobile make a difference to the bottom line?

In any marketing program or advertising campaign, execution is as important as the strategy. Programmatic buying assists in executing efficiently, allowing more time to be spent focussing on the big picture.

So lets talk about the benefits of programmatic buying, and how marketers in the mobile ecosystem can reap the rewards.

More cost saving and effectiveness

Traditional media buying practices can be pretty cumbersome and time consuming; the advent of mobile and programmatic buying takes a lot of the legwork out of media buying. The need to ring publishers, identify custom audiences, book local media, negotiate rates are lifted via the click of a few buttons, in turn allowing the media planner/buyer to do their job, focus on the creativity and science behind the message and comms platform.

Programmatic buying is able to lighten the load, but it cannot replace a strategic and creative mind.

Connect with audiences through more impactful messaging

The first step in any marketing process is determining your target audience, programmatic buying makes it much easier, and faster, to find users that fall into your categories. Faster and more targeted advertising increases overall ad impact, and programmatic allows advertisers to be selective with whom to specifically target and can reach that audience in real time.

In fact, when using real time bidding, an ad can be displayed on a screen within milliseconds – ensuring that your ad is still extremely relevant to your target audience. The service makes decisions using first and third party data about consumers’ demographics, including location, income, gender, marital status and interests, but it also goes one step further. Programmatic can tell you a user’s search history, whether they have visited your site or app before, and even if they have previously viewed your ad. Using this you can refine your messaging and eliminate wastage of marketing dollars on the wrong audience or message.

Embracing cross screen behaviour and customer journeys

Multi-screen behaviour is often spoken about but hard to act upon. Furthermore as much as we deny it last click attribution is still rife within our industry.

If someone is researching a product on their desktop in the morning, see’s a YouTube video about it throughout the day and then finally orders the product via a coupon site on their mobile during the evening train trip home, we still most likely attribute this sale to the coupon site. It’s hard for us to calculate the influence other media had on this decision.

Programmatic advertising especially via social channels like Facebook provides marketers with a mechanism to monitor customer behaviour from digital TV, to desktop through to mobile allowing you to target customers using the most relevant and compelling offers.

Video, video and video

Marketers are now well and truly aware of the effectiveness of video especially on lifting brand metrics. Programmatic video only helps step up these efforts. On the mobile the ability to target based on geo-location, interests, interaction via mobile apps and mobile web makes programmatic video media the most compelling media investment for brand and BTL marketers.

Insights you can learn from

Not only does programmatic buying provide insights before audiences are targeted it also provides great insights once impressions have been served. Marketers receive insights on how audiences engaged with their ads, behavioural nuances based on location, time of day that works best and what retargeting and retention tactics work the best.

Whilst we can see that programmatic media buying on the mobile is hyper contextual and certainly something that directly impacts the bottom line, there is no getting away from the fact that marketing is still about the right message at the right time.

Programmatic advertising especially on mobile makes enabling this a lot easier but nothing can take away from solid strategic planning and creativity itself.

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