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Programmatic Guide: Acquire Online’s strategic director Ant Ord

As part of our Programmatic Guide, full-service programmatic trading desk Acquire Online takes a look at media supply chain, precision targeting, and connecting the marketers to the consumer. 

Should brand managers lean into programmatic media? Is it important they understand the media supply chain?

Absolutely, paid media is a huge procurement cost for all advertisers. It’s really important to understand why every media selection is made, how the performance is measured relative to that criteria and how every media dollar is being spent across all suppliers. When programmatic moves from mostly digital display and video to multi-media (e.g.: connected TV and outdoor) in the near future, the importance of transparency in the supply chain will multiply ten-fold. 

Is it even possible to shift from mass market to precision targeting of high-value customer segments across channels?

Yes, if you enable the data pipelines to capture and sort the necessary behaviour data to build customer segments at scale. Precision at scale is about reaching your most significant audiences. Instead of targeting large generic TV audiences of maybe 1 million or 2 million people, target just the 20 percent who create 80 percent of sales… that’s still 200,000 or 400,000 people.

What embedded programmatic tools would you recommend to identify waste in the eco-system?

The biggest causes of waste are non-viewable inventory, fraudulent inventory and excessive frequency. To reduce waste and increase the effectiveness of your advertising takes effort: black-list publishers with poor viewability, run brand safety software to avoid bidding on invalid- traffic and cap frequency by unique-user-ID. Or at the very least by device ID or browser IP. Saving wasted budget means you can reinvest in other digital channels to reach new customers and drive branding or sales growth.

What’s a practical solution to eliminate the silos that separate the brand marketer from the consumer?

Start working much closer with your programmatic trading team and data analysts. Programmatic is marketing democracy in action. People tell you very quickly which brand ads they like, the ones they don’t and if your customer experiences convert to actions. Think of all the tracking and measurement as being a radar echo or a consumer research panel of people telling you what they like via click-through and completed view rate.

Do marketers need to 100 percent in control of their first party audience data? Does this enable the cross-channel single view of the customer?

Ideally, all brands should manage their own data platforms. The reality is the cost is still prohibitive for a small market like New Zealand. Working with a trusted Kiwi-owned agency and global (GDPR compliant) ad-tech partners is the best compromise. For the single view, the key is creating a singular moment where multiple devices and browsers can be assigned to one unique-user-id. Media Math offers a Unique Identifier solution within their buying platform. This tech is how Netflix knows what episodes you have been watching across all the devices you login to.

What are the core roles within an in-house programmatic team that must be resourced?

  • A team leader (the pilot) to fly and know every part of the plane.
  • A programmatic planner (the navigator) to advise on the best routes to take.
  • A data analyst (the engineer) to fuel the plane with data.
  • A ground crew of campaign optimisers, traffickers, data gatherers and reporters.

We suggest a crew of seven to nine is about the minimal size to manage a full programmatic stack effectively. We think a brand or agency needs digital ad spends in excess of $5 million per annum.

This story is part of a content partnership with Acquire Online.

To read more of the Programmatic Guide, click here.

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