My Top Takeaways From Programmatic Week

In this guest post, Amnet MD Indy Khabra (pictured above) shares his top takeouts from Programmatic Week – a week dedicated to educating Dentsu Aegis Network staff on the very latest innovation and changes to the industry.

The speed of technological disruption is accelerating. Keeping on top of the latest developments is challenging – even overwhelming. So, at Amnet, the programmatic expertise for Dentsu Aegis Network, we launched Programmatic Week – a week dedicated to educating our staff on the very latest innovation and changes to the industry in line with the theme of ‘Transforming the Digital Future’.

Here are some of the key takeaways of the week…

Transparency is more than a buzzword

Amnet hs partnered with measurement and verification solutions like Integral Ad Science and provide an agnostic approach to technology, selecting only the partners that provide the most value for advertising spend in a brand safe and compliant way. By having more transparent conversation with clients, Amnet maintains their trust to protect brand equity while delivering business outcomes.

“You need to leverage tools that share your values, allow you to measure what you want to measure and see what you want to see, so that your campaign ends up where you want it to end up,” said Will Jensen, account director at AppNexus, said.

On discussing inventory quality indicators, “there has been an explosion in supply with little transparency differentiating the good from the bad”, said Integral Ad Science’s ANZ managing director, James Diamond. “With the rise of measurement, the industry now has the ability to see what is good and what is not, and optimise towards what is good.”

The latest Mary Meeker report highlights that tech companies are facing something of a privacy paradox. They are caught between using data to provide better consumer experiences, and violating consumer privacy. Advertisers – and their agency partners – are also treading carefully. Dentsu Aegis Network’s people-based marketing platform M1 has recently launched in Australia, putting us at the forefront of this brave new world.

Audio: what’s old is new again

The original form of communication at scale is finding a renewed sense of vitality in the digital age. With connected cars, digital assistants and mobile devices, it’s always-on and often intimately captured audiences provide a new way to connect with consumers with efficiencies using data and programmatic. It’s an intuitive and mostly opt-in user experience for listeners who come back time and again to their trusted podcast or morning show hosts.

“People are consuming more content than ever before – because it’s more available and convenient than ever before,” said Jennifer Stokes, commercial digital platform manager at Nova. It’s also an experienced channel with deeply rooted expertise in how to best communicate with voice, providing for a quick learning curve when transferring that intelligence into the digital realm.

According to the IAB, 13.6 million Australians accessed streaming audio in December 2017, creating a huge opportunity to connect with a highly engaged audience. Wired magazine agrees, reporting that “The medium is inherently intimate, and easily creates a one-sided feeling of closeness between listener and host – the sense that the person talking into your ear on your commute is someone you know, whose product recommendations you trust, and whose work you want to support.”

Furthermore, in a new survey of British podcast listeners, 25 per cent said they were ‘more likely’ to purchase a product promoted by a podcast host because they trusted their judgement, and almost 40 per cent said they had bought or tried something their favourite podcaster had recommended.

Identifying value in identity

Keeping up with consumers is an ongoing challenge, made more complex by the rapid growth of digital touch points. While closed ecosystems with logged in users can provide verified identity, it’s an ongoing concern for marketers to understand and connect with their customers across their entire journey.

“Every platform, every technology provider, every player in the activation chain has their own identifiers or keys – that expire over time and get replaced by new keys, for every device and user” said Adele Wieser, country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Index Exchange. “The industry needs a solution that provides a skeleton key to connect disparate identities in order to keep up with customers when they are engaged beyond the walled gardens.”

The future of successful marketing relies on identity solutions that offer a holistic, single view of the customer, enabling brands to message in a more seamless and relevant way.

Connecting the TV screens requires industry collaboration

One of the challenges that remains for TV is that there is no scale without a single classification to connect publishers, content and screens. And it’s difficult to effectively measure the way consumers engage across the growing number of screens, often at the same time.

Consumers are ahead of the technology in terms of leveraging multiple screens. Viewers don’t think in terms of funnels but what they want to watch, where and when it’s convenient for them.

“We’re seeing more premium publishers, platforms and data suppliers working together to provide greater scale to connect both offline and online behaviours,” said Yasmin Sanders, founder and director of Zipp Media Solutions. “A key ingredient for connecting the TV screens, and ultimately the single view of the customer is a standardised set of metrics at scale across all connection points with the ability to tie them to outcomes.”

Harmonisation of metrics means looking beyond reach to understand the benefits of personalisation in consumption behaviours and attention.

Keep on learning

With our industry in constant evolution, the most important thing that we can do is keep on top of the latest trends, like those above, and how we can leverage them to best serve our clients. And by collaborating with the best partners to always be educating our staff, we can in turn offer better and different solutions that provide real business outcomes for brands.