Author: Sierra Ducey

In 2018, an estimated $46 billion was spent on programmatic advertising by all Internet marketers. It’s further projected that by 2020 up to 90 percent of all the display ads you see on your cellphone screen will be programmatic.

In short, this digital technology is revolutionizing the way ad business is conducted, and how you’ll run your next travel marketing campaign. So we should start by answering a basic question.

What is programmatic advertising?

You see the fruits of programmable ad strategy just about every time you go online. Conduct an Internet search to find a nearby coffeehouse in Schenectady and you’re suddenly assailed with display ads for Schenectady coffeehouses on seemingly every web page.

In the early days of Internet marketing, you had to place your display ads…somewhere. Maybe you put an ad for a Cancun weekend getaway on Travelocity and trusted that at least a few people going to that page on that site were looking into Mexican resort vacations.

Programmatic advertising doesn’t wait for interested Cancun travelers to land where your ad happens to be. Google algorithms track individuals who’ve used search terms and visited websites that identify them as having an interest in Cancun travel.

That’s critical because most people don’t even notice display ads…except those that match a current need. A Cancun weekend getaway ad will totally escape your attention unless you happen to be conducting Internet research regarding pricing and availability of Cancun travel packages.

It’s much different than the old “spray and pray” advertising approach of dropping ads everywhere your budget will allow where you think interested parties just might show up.

Writing campaign-effective KPIs

The thing is, your programmatic ads are only as good as your programming. Once you set your campaign in motion, it will do whatever you told it to do. But how do you know you’re telling your automated campaign to do smart and cost-effective things? That’s where your KPIs come in.

Your key performance indicators are your documentation of what you want your programmatic advertising campaign to accomplish – and then what it did. If you are working with a programmatic partner, they can advise you on the KPIs that are most relevant for your brand and other digital efforts and how your campaign may stack up against the competition.

Effective travel marketing KPIs

Now that you know the basics of running a programmatic campaign for travel advertising, let’s look at some indicators you might consider tracking to measure performance.

1. Number of unique website visitors — There’s a lot that this number won’t tell you, but it’s a good place to start. If you know your average monthly unique visitor count, you can easily get a quick snapshot of performance by checking out your new numbers after campaign launch.
2. Conversion rate — What are people doing once you land them on your landing page? What do you want them to do? Watch a destination video? Download a brochure? Sign up for your email newsletter? How many are doing it? This is where A/B testing is a useful strategy. Use it to compare the effectiveness of varying offers and creative approaches.
3. Audience Engagement and Sales — You want engagement and sales, especially among your most valuable audience members. How many qualified prospects do you expect to reach through this campaign? How many leads do you need to convert to paying customers to justify the media spend?
4. Return on investment — ROI is always your bottom-line marketing metric, isn’t it? For many ad managers, it’s the difference between that next promotion or budget increase.

Maintain constant focus

No programmatic advertising campaign is static. While your ad placement is automated, your job doesn’t end after hitting a few buttons. You must constantly analyze the metrics, see what meets your KPIs and what doesn’t, and adjust your messaging and placement strategy for ever-better results.

As long as you do this, you’ll find your mistakes early and be able to reconfigure quickly and cost-effectively.

May the metrics be with you!

Guest Author: Jared Jackson, Client Development 

Think about how you make an online purchase nowadays, it’s often a scrupulous process – reviewing products, digesting reviews, inquiring on 3rd party sites until you’ve found the product that fits your standards and needs –

“Digital channels are much more important to driving physical channels than the e-commerce transactions themselves…[it’s] starting to affect the way companies think about the role of digital in driving their whole brand.” – Steve Dennis, President, SageBerry Consulting

As marketers, discovering how your target consumers are behaving in this shift of retail e-commerce allows you to execute precise media buys that find relevant consumers at the most optimal times in their path-to-purchase.

So what are these shifts? The growth and change in e-commerce is the result of a culmination of parts:

• Technology advancement is allowing the consumer to use their mobile device to make purchases more seamlessly – according to Emarketer mobile commerce is expected to supersede desktop by the year 2021.
• Social media platforms are becoming the premier partners for direct-to-consumer brands – hyper-relevant 1st party data makes the consumer’s path incredibly transparent making it easier than ever to model, target, and reach your ideal customers
• e-Commerce is cut-throat – According to Emarketer Amazon is the king of e-commerce, accounting for nearly 4 out of every 10 dollars spent in e-commerce.  In an industry where sales are won and lost by mere inches on desktop and mobile screens, investing in an advertising strategy to get in front of consumers first and more frequently is key.

To keep up with the e-commerce shifts mentioned above, it’s imperative marketers activate the right tactics Have no fear, we’ve made it easy to tell you to get started. Below you’ll find three must-try tactics to get more out of your advertising investments.

1. Social media advertising
   Social media is the #1 driver of customer acquisition amongst 61% of direct-to-consumer brands according to eMarketer. 
   Using social media for customer acquisition may seem like an obvious must for all e-commerce brands but it’s something marketers continue to struggle with. There are a couple of prerequisites for using social media for customer acquisition. First, you need to have a clear idea of who you are trying to reach. Second, you need a media plan that diversifies ad spending across any social media networks your customers are using. Example: a media plan that includes Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest rather than a plan that focuses solely on Facebook.
2. In-App Advertising
   According to App Annie, retail app sessions in the US jumped 70% from 2016 to 2018, signaling a notable shift in consumers’ digital shopping habits.
   Mobile commerce is quickly becoming a leading force in driving online retail sales. The barrier has been lifted in regards to aversion downloading mobile apps.  For e-commerce brands, this means two things. More opportunities to collect 1st party data on users of their owned app and more opportunities to reach consumers in an app-based context beyond your owned app. Example: targeting consumers with an offer while they are streaming music or playing a game in-app.
3. Influencer Marketing
   According to Emarketer, influencers are equally as effective as paid ads are for customer acquisition channels.
   As a marketer looking to invest in influencer marketing, your job is to identify the most important influencers for your brand, whether they are existing customers, industry experts, or celebrities with a niche following. While influencers are often characterized as having high traffic or follower numbers, it’s important not to overlook factors like engagement. After all, engagement is what digital advertising is all about.

About a month ago, I posted a blog about the changing dynamic of digitally native brands. Brands that started and found great success online – think Allbirds, Away, Outdoor Voices – are now shifting their brand position to include brick and mortar stores. At the same time, we’re constantly seeing headlines about consumers, millennials, in particular, shifting more and more toward online shopping. We’re bombarded with headlines like “…malls see tsunami of store closures, falling traffic,” “These haunting photos of the retail apocalypse reveal a new normal in America…” and “Malls are doomed: 25% will be gone in 5 years.”

So, if everything is pointing towards abandoning storefront, why are successful companies investing in these new brick and mortar locations?

It’s no question that consumers are shifting their spending dollars towards e-commerce, consumers will spend $586.92 billion on e-commerce in 2019, representing 10.7% of all US retail spending (a 14% increase from 2018). However, brick and mortar retail still account for the remaining  89.3% of total US retail spending. Brands shouldn’t shy away from opening up brick-and-mortar locations, they just need to 1.) ensure they understand where brick-and-mortar fits within the modern customer journey and 2.) ensure they can reach consumers no matter where they are at along the customer journey.   

The modern customer journey doesn’t start and stop online, today it continues beyond the screen to include in-store experiences and purchases. Here are three things marketers should keep in mind when building out a comprehensive marketing plan that encompasses the entire consumer journey:

1. The customer journey is changing: The traditional customer journey was a straight path outlined as awareness, familiarity, consideration, and purchase. However, with the increase in brand touchpoints, there is no longer a uniform customer journey. What was once a straight line to purchase, is now more of a loop. The customer journey loop requires brands to interact with the consumers long before and long after a purchase is made. Even after a purchase, customers continue to read reviews and look at competitor products, so brands need to continue their conversation and work even harder in hopes of eventually winning that customer loyalty. 

2. Design an omnichannel marketing strategy: Today, the options for brands to tell their stories extends beyond print, out-of-home, and TV placements to include digital advertising buys like display, search, and social. A modern approach to advertising is no longer about reaching people in siloed channels. It’s increasingly about reaching real people with the flexibility to meet audiences wherever the are across the customer journey.

Additionally, brands need to incorporate personalization ads and experiences, based on where a customer is in the journey as mentioned above. For example, programmatic advertising allows brands to target consumers based on the products they’ve looked at, past purchases and so much more.

3. Look beyond 3rd party data alone: There is no single digital tactic that can magically drive growth, but a data-driven marketing strategy is a critical aspect of any successful brand’s marketing DNA. Third-party data has become table-stakes. Thinking beyond third-party data expands the area of opportunities for marketers by enabling them to go beyond a pre-packaged audience. Consider layering on the following data sources to generate audience models that can be used in omnichannel marketing campaigns that help acquire new customers:

• 1st party CRM data
• Geo-location data
• App-ownership data
• Social media data

With newly emerging touchpoints, like shoppable ads on social media, brands are constantly challenged to stay in step with the modern customer journey. Finding a digital partner that can help you navigate this challenge and can make your job a little bit easier. To get started with streamlining your omnichannel marketing plan, contact us today. 

Exposure to targeted advertising is the norm on the social media platforms that kids, teenagers, and young adults use every day. Popular platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter structure their user experience around personalization. Customized content is fed to the individual with every use — and advertisements are no exception in thanks to programmatic. But one app in particular is getting significant attention as it is beginning to explore programmatic advertising implementation. TikTok is a social media app built on curated content – even more so than those previously mentioned – so it only seems fitting that their advertising should begin to do the same. Currently, TikTok only offers direct IO buys to advertisers, but is working on a biddable advertising options, projected to launch this summer. With more advanced targeting methods available, this sparks a great opportunity for advertisers to utilize an extremely popular platform and reach new audiences. 

So, What Exactly is TikTok? 
TikTok, a social platform, was created in August 2018 when the Chinese company, ByteDance, bought Musical.ly and transferred its user accounts to TikTok. Prior to the app transfer, the platform was extremely popular and with the implementation of celebrity endorsements and paid partnerships, it has continued to grow – now being one of the most downloaded apps. Currently, the app is projected to have over 500 million monthly active users, mostly in the United States, China and other Asian countries.
TikTok users upload short form (under 15 seconds) videos to their profiles with added music or visual effects. Users can then track the popularity of their videos, similar to other platforms, with likes and comments, interact with other users and explore other users, trends or hashtags. The videos can be uploaded with hashtags to follow trends – anything from a running joke to a dance or lip-sync challenge, allowing users to hone in on their creativity and make widespread trends their own. 
These videos are shareable in nature, which is why TikTok videos are already filling our other social media feeds, making them universally known. Gen Z, it’s most popular demographic, has embraced this app as a place to explore humor and create light-hearted content. The app is a refreshing break from the mainstream social media platforms; apps such as Instagram and Facebook are centered around gaining social status rather than creating content that is actually new and unique, resulting in content that inevitably begins to look the same. TikTok completely strays from the social norm as it allows young people to feel comfortable creating offbeat content they truly find entertaining. 

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?
The addition of biddable advertising to a platform like TikTok offers great opportunities for marketers. It has been over five year, since Vine launched in 2013 after being acquired by Twitter, that a new social media platform has gained such traction and been able to break through the mundanity of what people are accustomed to scrolling through. 
TikTok doesn’t currently have a widely available ad solution, so implementing programmatic will make a strong impact where users aren’t used to seeing advertisements. The app will use in-feed video ads, brand takeover ads and banner ads that will inspire users to participate in brand-designed video challenges. The app will also offer branded lenses that a user may select to use in their own videos.
TikTok is distinguishable as a place where a young demographic can be reached in an environment where they are comfortable. The app is an outlet for carefree humor. Advertisers can create native content in a way that is natural and non-invasive through matching the app’s original, unique energy. Implementing TikTok into your advertising plan will also allow brands to reach a multinational audience, as the app is also widely used in other countries. The advertising expansion of TikTok is a distinguished way to reach new demographics naturally in an environment that is new and fresh.
 
Interested in learning more about incorporating social media advertising into your media plan? Reach out to learn how we can help here. 

Brands born on the internet are starting to head out into the sunlight. Digital native companies like Glossier, Casper, and Outdoor Voices, are clamoring for more exposure in undiscovered places. They’re gaining traction and entering new phases of growth. As they transform industries, they transform how and why people shop. And this isn’t just happening on social media: it’s happening in real life, across traditional marketing platforms. From direct mail to TV ads to brick and mortar storefronts, those ‘online only’ sites are beginning to hit backspace on their claims. The digitally native brands you know and love are now becoming omnichannel sellers — and the success they’re finding is making them top competitors online and offline.
What is a Digitally Native Brand?
These digital brands are all the rave across Facebook, Instagram, and everything in between. They’re revolutionizing old industries, (think health, home, and beauty,) clad in sleek, consumer-focused brand identities that beg for attention. They’re the foundation of the D2C, or direct-to-consumer, landscape where transactions are made digitally between buyers and businesses. Retailers have been replaced by websites where ease is a top priority. Consumers know what to expect and businesses are able to gather useful information about these target audiences for future usage. Stock overhead is limited, first-party data is accessed, hyper-targeted marketing and programmatic becomes possible; D2C, put plainly, has completely changed the face of buying behavior. These brands are disruptors that charge ahead with data and confidence in hand. And as more entrepreneurs with small business enter the digital space, (who can blame them – the benefits at hand are promising,) more original D2C brands are searching elsewhere for exposure. For many, that exposure exists beyond the realm of HTML codes and Shopify. It’s outside – where face to face interactions thrive and brand stories come to life.

What’s Next for D2C? Why Traditional Marketing?
Allbirds, Harry’s, Bombas; think of a successful D2C brand and these are just a few that come to mind. They are digitally oriented companies with boatloads of data that can be used across platforms. But can these platforms be offline? And if so, how? Where? Because more D2C brands are being forged, more D2C natives are finding it difficult to become discoverable across search engines. Which is why television and retail – yes, the industries these brands sought to challenge in the first place – are having a resurgence. It’s a goodbye to saturation and a promising hello to traditional marketing. So dust off your TVs and take a walk downtown, because those brands you’ve been seeing online just might be making a physical stop near you sometime soon:

• Why Television?: TV is still the most popular entertainment medium in the US. Even though phones and laptops are slowly becoming our best friends, that TV in the corner of your room is worth something to other consumers and marketers across industries. Unlike YouTube, the option to skip ads isn’t possible, (unless you choose to switch back and forth between channels) and the lengthiness of videos is compelling. Instead of delivering information quickly on the spot, a TV ad makes it possible to craft a campaign beyond the product itself. A story can be told outside of an image or a 15-30 second spot with the power of sight and sound. And if something is deemed relatable, entertaining, or emotional, a consumer will listen and remember the brand’s message. TV ads also provide clarity while defining reputability. It’s a medium traditionally reserved for big name brands with history and large consumer followings. So if a D2C brand makes it on TV, they’re automatically viewed as leaders in their industries. Online, that’s been difficult to establish. But with TV, (for the time being,) it’s a different story.
• And Retail?: The empty storefronts downtown are being taken over by event spaces and pop-up shops. Digitally native brands are dominating the web, but consumers are still living day-to-day in the physical space. They like to shop, learn more, explore new brands, get immersed by the companies they trust. To meet targets, (new and old) and show off products, D2C companies are pursuing retail. Physical spaces are becoming showrooms for websites where events can be held and products can be purchased in-real-time. Shipping fees are gone and questions are answered on the spot. It’s another way to meet and teach others, all while establishing a positive brand identity. And if consumers don’t buy right then and there in store, maybe their positive experience will incentivize them to buy online. It’s a touchpoint that is growing in popularity; giving a more enhanced view of brands and their unique personalities.

TV advertising and pop-up shops are only the beginning. The data points these brands have earned online can be used in these outlets to create more transformative experiences. By doing so, D2C brands can expect higher conversions and greater profits just by stepping outside. Because it’s no longer just about being digital — it’s about using what was obtained from digital to make even greater impact offline.

At Google’s I/O event earlier this month, it was announced that multiple privacy updates will be rolling out to Chrome users over the course of 2019. The following is a guide about what is being updated to better prepare marketers, media planners, and advertisers for what lies ahead in the digital advertising space.
What’s Being Blocked and Why?
To protect privacy and give consumers the power to choose how and why they are being marketed to online, Google Chrome is updating the following processes:

• Third-Party Cookie Collection: A major part of this new privacy initiative is the blocking of third-party cookies on the Chrome browser. Before delving more into this policy, let’s look back at what cookies are and what purpose they serve.

First-party cookies are generated when a consumer visits a website for the first time. They store the basic settings and preferences of a user, including their log-in information and shopping cart items. The site remembers this information, thereby improving the consumer’s experience with the site over time. Third party cookies, on the other hand, are the strings of code hosted by an advertiser’s server that record a consumer’s journey across the web. It is this data that advertisers use to display highly-targeted ads to users across digital platforms.
As mentioned in Google’s announcement, the third-party collection process on Chrome is being revamped. The browser will make it simpler for users to block or clear their third-party cookies that have amassed over time without disrupting their first-party cookies. To make this possible, Chrome is requiring websites to formally mark their data as first-party or third-party. Consumers will then be able to see what data is being used to target the ads they see and they’ll be able to keep or remove whatever third-party cookies they prefer.

• Fingerprinting: Browser fingerprinting is completed when the information used to display a page correctly, (think language preference, IP address, operating system, etc.) is manipulated to uniquely identify a user on the web. Under Google’s new policies, fingerprinting is restrained and will be blocked by default – unlike cookie blocking, which will be opt-in by users.

How Does This Affect Advertisers?
This move – along with the many web-based changes that are being made in GDPR’s shadow – means less data for agencies and advertisers to work with. Third-party data was once used to target ads to consumers at every stage of the shopping journey. If a consumer chooses to remove third-party cookies on Chrome, this no longer becomes a direct possibility. As a result, walled gardens such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google, (where first-party data thrives,) gain more control over the advertising process. Campaign optimization also becomes difficult and highly relevant ads are unable to be served in straightforward ways, making it difficult for marketers to determine if targeted ads are leading to sales. When it comes to digital advertising, brands need to find new ways to reach people in the right places, all while following the rules. Thankfully, there are workarounds to Google’s policies that are transparent, promising, and programmatically focused.
What are the Potential Workarounds?
With third-party cookies lacking, advertisers, agencies, ad-tech companies – any industry touching data – will need to quickly adapt to new digital advertising spaces. Thankfully, multiple solutions exist that abide by the new policies erupting in this era of transparency. Instead of resorting to mass messages that are unpersonalized and less targeted, consider the following options:

• Re-Engineer Your Cookies: If consumers are opting-out of tracking, think about re-engineering your site’s third-party cookies so they can operate in first-party environments. By doing so, opting-out isn’t an option and your operations will not be so easily blocked.
• Find Alternate Identifiers: Transparency is on the rise and cookies are losing traction. That being said, ad tech is working quickly to find alternate IDs that can be used to track how, when, and why people peruse the web. Google is advising advertisers to look into the power of email addresses and log-in information. These identifiers are going to become crucial for those hoping to serve targeted ads in the future. And it is always an option to move operations to marketing channels that do not rely on cookie data, such as mobile apps, OTT, social platforms, and so on.
• Target Content: If third-party data is blocked, retargeting becomes tricky. Opposed to focusing entirely on the individual, think about how your brand can serve ads on different sites in contextual ways. Go above and beyond the person seeing the ad by knowing what the user is consuming and where they are consuming it. Focus on the keywords, topics, locations, and different channels that are relevant to your creative assets and offerings. By doing so, the chances of reaching your target consumer increase significantly.

Google Chrome has more than 60% global market share, which means that these changes should not be taken lightly. Fortunately, it is not yet known how or when Chrome will promote the third-party cookie blocking process. The results will vary greatly depending on where the opt-out button will be found. Perhaps it’ll be a big alert button in the corner of the screen, or maybe a small button under a long settings tab. The possibilities are endless and are not so clear-cut. This is a signal to prepare for programmatic advertising without the use of third-party cookies. And at Digilant, we anticipate these changes and can help your brand navigate these new regulations in profitable, transparent ways. Interested in learning how we can help you through the changes? Reach out to us here.

Automatic content recognition, or ACR, is a technology that identifies consumed audio and video content on digital devices. Though most commonly associated with smart TVs, ACR can be perused on any platform connected to the internet. It isn’t available everywhere, however, and only becomes accessible if a user opts-in to data collection and has their device turned on. More people are trading in their old television sets for smart TVs – they’ll be in 75% of American homes by 2022 – which explains why the acronym has quickly become a marketing essential. Just as the Shazam app can help a user identify a song played in a store, an ACR enabled television can identify what a user is watching on a second-by-second basis to help brands strengthen their marketing efforts. Read on to learn more about ACR and how implementing it can benefit your brand and target consumers:

What is ACR and How Does it Work?
ACR is a software that listens and absorbs to identify content. In seconds, it can determine what a user is watching and if they are using a tablet, smart TV, or mobile device. It can also label the content as linear, OOT, DVR, or VOD, and is expected to become a $5 billion business by 2021. This intelligent, highly profitable data process operates in four steps:

• Step One – Unboxing and Consent: Automatic content recognition is launched when an individual turns on a wifi powered device for the first time. Users will be faced with the option to opt-in to audio/video data collection during this initial set-up phase. They can go back and edit their decision in the future, of course, but it is often difficult to do so. Many devices will even require being set-up again in order to revert this decision.
• Step Two – Fragment Analyzation: If a user opts-in to data collection, a device provider is able to analyze small fragments of images or sounds from the content being consumed over time. This capability is embedded in millions of internet devices and gives marketers the ability to understand what kind of programs and advertisements a user gravitates towards.
• Step Three – Content Matching: These tiny samples are then processed by ACR software and uploaded to the cloud. The content is cross-referenced and matched to existing fragments, audio, or video-based, to allow advertisers to determine what piece of content, (think a TV show, a music video, or an advertisement,) is being viewed by a user. This process generates data about a viewer’s history and becomes identifiable to marketers via a device’s IP address.
• Step Four – Personalized Targeting: The content has been matched and the information has been shared with select advertisers. From there, marketers can link devices together to learn more about target consumers and where their interests lie. With this information, brands are able to launch individualized, cross-device marketing campaigns that increase ad visibility and consumer interest.

How Does ACR Benefit Advertisers?
ACR works hand in hand with brands by giving them a cohesive glimpse into the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. With a user’s consent, advertisers are able to understand what people are watching in-real-time and how, when, and where their ads are being consumed. Having this information about viewing habits makes it simpler for companies to target the right ads to the right people in a personalized way. And by having an attached IP address, brands are able to retarget cross-functionally to encourage more viewers, (including those who weren’t paying attention to the ad,) to gain interest in the marketed product or service. ACR also allows brands to reach those who prefer to watch tv without ads. By knowing what content these individuals are consuming, marketers gain valuable insight as to where their interests lie and where they can be advertised to best. No matter the platform, this technology is what gives advertisers the highly anticipated ability to tailor highly customized messages to households and individuals nationwide.

How Does ACR Benefit Consumers?
Those that consent to audio and video tracking are also eligible for rewards. By opting-in, users are giving advertisers permission to deliver personalized ads to them across all approved devices. This gets rid of the unrelatable advertisements a consumer may be exposed to when watching television or scrolling through social media accounts. It makes their digital experience a unique one that caters to their hobbies and interests. It eliminates that ‘constantly being advertised to’ feeling and makes marketing feel like a normalized, seamless experience.

ACR has the power to revolutionize marketing as we know it and it will only continue to grow in popularity as more than half of US adults now own a streaming enabled television. To learn more about Digilant’s TV and video media buying capabilities, (especially when it comes to programmatic and addressable TV,) contact us here!

Programmatic adoption is rapidly rising, but some healthcare brands are still wary of making the investment. Guidelines put in place by government agencies are confusing, and the uncertainties surrounding patient privacy and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations are blurry. Healthcare brands want to reach the right audience for their services or products, but they don’t want to cross ethical or legal lines by taking audience targeting too far. Healthcare is one of the highest regulated industries and consumer health and medical record information is heavily protected, making it difficult to target the right audience online. Healthcare brands are limited in how they can track healthcare-based journeys, and they are unable to identify and retarget consumers based on known conditions. But the benefits of programmatic are promising. Keep reading to learn how healthcare brands can take on the digital space with confidence.
Why Programmatic? What are the Benefits?
71% of American adults venture online to learn more about healthcare information. By implementing programmatic strategies, healthcare and pharmaceutical brands are able to reach this promising audience quickly and effectively. And with 40% of consumers making healthcare-related decisions based on information found online, programmatic becomes a marketing must-have for healthcare brands. The digital space is where people research answers to questions and concerns about health. If they have a symptom, they look up potential causes. If something feels wrong, Google becomes the all-knowing provider of advice. Reaching these audiences online with targeted, contextually relevant ads (that abide by digital laws and regulations,) healthcare brands can break through the noise and actively engage potential customers. Before you get started, below are three things you should keep in mind if you’re planning to invest in programmatic

1. Understand Data Consent: It is essential for brands to acknowledge the NAI’s regulations pertaining to the collection of healthcare data before implementing programmatic strategies. According to the NAI, consumer consent of data collection is mandatory when sources pertain to sensitive health conditions such as mental health, cancer, HIV, AIDS, etc. When it comes to less urgent conditions such as dieting, acne, colds, or allergies, however, data collection consent is no longer necessary.
2. Target Based on Interest:  Consumers cannot be targeted or retargeted by healthcare brands based on health conditions. But they can be targeted based on their interests in conditions or symptoms. A healthcare brand can use what is known in the form of past content consumed to programmatically deliver ads. Though a brand cannot target someone with a certain disease, condition, or sickness, they can promote offerings to general audiences that are older and search for similar symptoms. These brands may not reach the perfect candidate, but they are increasing the probability of doing so tremendously.
3. Target Based on Content: Healthcare ads can be programmatically placed next to related content in the form of blog posts, videos, forums, and so on. The consumers searching for this content cannot be targeted or followed, but the content that reaches the right people can be pursued. Think of an anti-inflammatory drug popping up next to a blog about stomach pain. From there, whitelists can be used by pharma brands to assure that the same programmatic ads refrain from popping up on unreliable sites.

The future of programmatic for healthcare marketing is promising but undoubtedly complex. If you are ready to learn more about how you can leverage programmatic in your brand’s marketing plan, we’re ready to talk. Contact us today to get started!