Digital advertising that includes both high quality creative and relevant messaging is increasingly a high priority for media buyers and marketers. Advertisers see no reason why creative, rich media, and programmatic should be mutually exclusive – it’s the combination that achieves engagement and results with consumers. The combination of programmatic and engaging creative offers a wide range of new opportunities – using data to precisely tailor messages.
Marketing teams are moving away from click-centric strategies as the only way to measure engagement. With all the new high-touch, high-impact ad formats and the growing popularity of native ad placements, there is a whole new world opening up to advertisers in display ads, to provide a more robust user experience while still reaping the benefits of programmatic buying.
Creative has never been more crucial to display ads as it is today and agencies and marketing teams are paying attention because they realize that a display ad’s message or creative is just as important as the channel or medium through which it’s served.
What is Programmatic Creative?
Programmatic creative
has the ability to use the data collected from a programmatic display campaign to create a more personalized experiences for consumers. Rather than displaying one generic creative, new technologies, like Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), mean that the ad creative can be tailored to the viewer in real-time, across multiple devices, according to their location, what they are doing, and the time of day – improving the overall user experience.
Where programmatic advertising matches users to ads on a one-to-one basis in real-time, DCO supports the matching of the best creative for that user during the programmatic advertising process.
Instead of marketers and advertisers having to figure out a one-size-fits-all, mass-market approach to their creative for a campaign, now they can create hyper-relevant ads that are relevant to individual users, while reaching a larger audience. Using the sizable amount of data that is collected from each campaign, programmatic creative can enable automatically generated ads relevant to products or services that customers are viewing, helping to move customers towards the conversion path, and returning customers into repeat purchasers – building long-term loyalty and increasing returns for those campaigns.
Programmatic Advertising has Changed the Role of Display Ads
With programmatic taking the largest share of digital marketing budgets, the role of display advertising has been reborn and redefined. More than four in five US digital display ad dollars, or $45.72 billion, will flow via programmatic means by 2019.
It’s no secret that different formats accomplish vastly different goals for marketers and media buyers. As the role of display advertising is redefined, and programmatic has dramatically changed the landscape, marketers need their display options to emphasize relevance for each consumer and define their experience as unique rather than obtrusive.
If campaigns are to remain relevant, marketers should be considering themselves not solely as advertisers, but as storytellers. Marketers and publishers alike are turning to programmatic creative to enhance user experience and keep the customer at the center.
Our marketing teams have the dollars, started Jonathon, we develop the media strategy but the IO’s come out of the agencies. We benefit by receiving data from our agencies that come into our cloud as outbound data. Everything’s piped back in house which is helpful, because the people at the agency and those of us at Turner aren’t within the same 4 walls every day to examine how to best leverage all data we receive. The ownership is all held within Turner and then we execute it within the brand. For Sean they have been using a hybrid model for a number of years. We buy some media but our agency does it at scale. They are focused on maintaining that model, they don’t plan to cross over into that space. The goal is to simplify media buying for our hotels and take the burden off them so they can focus on operating and delivering exceptional guest experiences. They know that they have experts that can manage it. At Equifax, Joella said that they have a very close relationship with their agency. They transact with complete transparency and because of security they own all of their contracts. Because of the verticals that they deal with, they own the contracts, but work with their agency to develop the strategies and are at each others offices multiple times a week. She likes that the agency works with multiple clients and draws from that experience so they can help you pivot and you can rely on their network to get there.
Joella started by saying that they do set a budget at the beginning of the year, but then they look at the data everyday, so that they can move budget between channels and countries. The budgets get laid out but they are very fluid, they look at the data daily for high level results and then weekly for deep insights. The way we move money around is not common and very smart. We’re able to take our data in such real time and make these really smart efficient decisions in that month that might not make the most sense in the next month based on where the credit market’s going. Having data at your fingertips and moving it to drive the best revenue is great. Jonathon’s challenge is that he doesn’t know who’s going to watch, they have no idea. They still care about buzz in the marketplace sot they still have to spray and pray to have the full brand experience. For product it’s still very DR focused. Sean is managing 1700 individual interests and they manage those budgets like they are their own. They are looking at their budgets on daily basis especially on a meta search basis, they don’t have large budgets, especially the cheaper hotels but have to treat them like they have large budgets.
Pam’s response was that the customer journey is so fragmented and you need to be nimble and relevant. So how do you do that we when attention spans are so short and dispersed? You need to know your client, what they are looking, likes, dislikes and demographics so that you can segment effectively and then map back to the customer journey. Measurement is really important to us, we now know what is working, our job is to educate the clients on perceived failures and transition that into the next campaign.
I have tried them all, he said – channels like TV, radio and outdoor. Using the data to drive the decisions in every channel and making sure they use the right partner that can get there. There is now an average of eight devices per household, knowing that TV is still very important also knowing at the same time that what you put on their devices is equally as important. And it takes data to drive that connection.
Working with non-profit we stand for credibility, transparency and trust, in today’s climate, pairing those three things with programmatic is tricky. We want to show our ads in opportune and also safe places, not all those scary places that you can go on the web. Something you have to think about, like what we said earlier about data partners, who are my partners and can I hold them accountable.
Most consumers have one mobile phone number. Since mobile providers allow for a phone number to be transferred from one provider to another, consumers don’t often change their number. The mobile number is a non-fleeting, unique identifier that represents a consumer. If all digital behavior could be tied to a mobile phone number, advertisers would have a full profile of their consumers.