Martin Kelly, CEO & Co-founder at Infectious Media, shares his views on the state of the programmatic advertising industry
We have seen a lot of research showing that the biggest hindrance for the uptake of programmatic advertising is the understanding and knowledge of the marketer. This is a damning indictment on the programmatic industry as we have made things too removed from the marketer’s day job.
Having created a uniquely powerful way of finding the right person at the right moment in the right way, we have then disguised the benefits with talk about the technology.
For many marketers, programmatic advertising is a way to buy leftover, or ‘remnant’, inventory. But this misses the strategic opportunity of using data to fulfil a wider marketing objective.
One of the biggest shifts in programmatic advertising over the past 18 months has been the uptake from brand advertisers. This has been driven by factors including the increased availability of video and large formats, and new measurement tools using recognised metrics such as GRP (gross rating points) and OCR (online campaign ratings). The opportunity to combine smart buying technology with the guarantee that ads will appear on premium publisher sites in high-impact formats excites brand marketers. But even with this growth, programmatic is only taking a minority piece of the digital pie.
Education is the key challenge and has to be tackled in an open and honest way. Success will hinge on clients having a clear idea of what to expect from programmatic to enable them to determine the best technology partner for their business. Only in this way will long-term relationships be forged and great work achieved.
If you are client side, you may be exhausted by the requirements put upon you. However, there is another. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to improve your own understanding as you will need the support of internal stakeholders for whom programmatic is likely to be new. This is most apparent with IT and those responsible for the company’s data assets. We often find a marketer’s appetite for programmatic dampened when they turn to the logistics of making it happen internally. In these cases, we become part of the marketer’s arsenal, offering technical advice and, importantly, talking the same language as the IT and data teams.
Programmatic advertising straddles two worlds that have historically maintained a safe distance but are now colliding. As an industry we need to be multilingual, talking technology only when appropriate and increasingly talking to the marketer in their own language, offering strategic programmatic solutions that meet their business objectives.
This article featured in Marketing Week's programmatic buying essential guide. To read the supplement click here.
