This post is meant for agencies and brands looking to adopt programmatic buying and wanting to know more about its benefits.
Consumer Internet brands in India were probably the first ones to adopt programmatic buying a few years ago to drive their remarketing spends. In 2015-16, programmatic buying went beyond remarketing spends to drive top of the funnel activities (branding and prospecting) for marketers across Consumer and B2B Internet, FMCG (CPG), Tech, Telecom, Autos, Financial Services and Real Estate.
The momentum programmatic buying generated in 2016, and the sheer curiosity and intent from agencies and brands that haven’t adopted programmatic yet, indicates that India will witness tipping point of programmatic buying in 2017.
Agencies and brands looking to adopt programmatic obviously want to know about its benefits. Here’s what our successful clients and partners have seen as its top 3 benefits.
- Unified Reach – Enterprise-scale programmatic buying platforms offer massive reach as they are plugged into practically all sources of display inventory, across desktop, video and mobile, including and beyond what Google Display Network (GDN) offers. This translates to global reach and unified frequency capping (rather than targeting the same audience through multiple publishers and ad networks causing frequency duplication) and more importantly, ability to spend your budgets at scale economically. I know of marketers that have switched off GDN in favor of programmatic buying, while still getting access to all the inventory GDN offers.
- Audience Targeting – The primary differentiator in programmatic compared to traditional media buying is the ability to target desired audiences based on explicit or predictive interest, intent, demographics and look-alikes – at scale! For instance, the YOptima platform drives great scale and ROI by modeling and then targeting look-alikes of transacting customers for a leading domain registration and web hosting brand. In the process, we discovered that a majority of transacting customers for this brand were not Small and Media Businesses (SMBs) as conceived earlier, but the web designers and web professionals hired by the SMBs to build their website.
- Transparency and Efficiency – An increasing share of online display advertising is moving towards programmatic due to its inherent efficiency over the traditional Insertion Order (IO) process – both workflow and performance. Programmatic buying is all about buying media transparently (as opposed to blind ad network buys) driving reporting transparency and the insights it generates to achieve better scale and ROI.
In summary, programmatic buying is an innovation in Display Advertising, making it more effective and efficient. It’s meant to complement and not replace Search or Social marketing.
If you have used programmatic buying before, what’s been your experience like? What would you call out as the top 3 benefits of programmatic buying?
