Programmatic media buying is a term thrown around a lot among digital and other media agencies. It is referred to as the future of online advertising; primarily because it will digitalize all media advertisement buying processes in the near future. A demand for automation of the buying, booking and tracking process for ad placements led to Programmatic Buying (PB) becoming a reality. PB automates the complete buying process and displays ads to users in less than a 100 milliseconds.
For example, Kellogg’s, in the US, was able to improve efficiency of its marketing spend and make sure that they delivered the right message to the right people. This resulted in an increase in the viewability of their ads from 56% to upwards of 70% during the year. Kellogg’s agreed that PB is an efficient and effective way to engage with their consumers. L’Oreal had a similar experience. PB helped L’Oreal double their revenue, achieving over 2,200% return on ad spend and increased web traffic. These case studies showcase the importance of PB for the future of media digitization.
The key advantages of PB include the price point (cheaper to acquire inventory), access to more data to create audience insights to improve the effectiveness of a campaign, increased transparency to ad placements that allow the brand to ensure brand reputation is maintained, improved targeting capabilities for a more focused reach & engagement with selected target audience and, lastly, better efficiency and accuracy of launching a campaign across multiple devices with minimum wastage of time.
For ethnic marketing, PB ensures laser-like targeting to improve return on investment and campaign performances. As most global citizens and multicultural audiences are constantly on the move, consumer preferences & brand receptiveness changes from time to time. At MCX, we use our unique audience and country of origin insights and integrate them into our PB strategy, which utilizes available data from large data sets of ethnic inventory to capture and meet the ever-evolving consumer preferences of multicultural audiences. For example, a middle-aged Indian mom is just as easily targetable as a young Chinese professional in Australia, who likes to shop on Chinese and American websites.
The Chinese and South Asian demographics are the fastest growing new audiences, primarily belonging to Y and X generations. Most of these multicultural audiences are tech savvy and use several digital mediums as their major source of information. MCX understands multicultural audiences and how to reach them. Online PB is a cost effective, convenient and fast approach to reach out to these audiences. Specialists in PB (like MCX) can facilitate the launch of a multicultural marketing campaign, within 24 hours, to reach a niche target audience based on their ethnicity, topic of interest or much more.
In the past two years, audiences are spending more time online, either on their desktops or smartphones. This has resulted in a meteoric rise in PB. Coming from a 0% market share, in 2009, to over 55% of display spend, in 2015, this number is set to grow to over 63% in the next year. This means that there is going to be little scope for traditional media in the coming decade. However, TV, Radio, Outdoor and Print can be integrated into the PB process, which will be an interesting ride as technology advances in this digital space.
By Harik Malik