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Jon Clarke – Director of Innovation, spaceandtime.co.uk, @spacetimemedia

Understanding Programmatic:Five Common Misconceptions

Audience data and programmatic

So you keep hearing about data (big data, small data, live data etc…) and programmatic media buying and probably even have a general understanding about them all, but there are some dangerous misconceptions that I’ll try and debunk for you here.

Just one thing first; Programmatic Media Buying is just one element of your media buying armoury and not an answer to all your needs and to get the best out of it you need time, resource and a very decent budget. Okay let’s proceed debunking myths.

1.“Cookies mean no privacy?” Cookies are in large part aggregated and anonymised.

This means that personal information, for instance, your home address, email address and phone number, is not collected.

Although they get some bad press, cookies are vital to the ecosystem because they allow users to have personalisation of content.

It also enables brands to learn more about their users’ favourite content by tracking cookies so that the same ad does not repeatedly appear.

Cookies are not the only way to record and track digital campaigns and they do not work on smartphone apps, so there is a move to session ID solutions by some of the major players like Facebook’s Atlas solution.

2. “I just need to buy inventory programmatically, I do not need data”

Programmatic advertising is using automated systems and data to make media buying decisions without humans. It's about efficiency, scale, and targeting.

The average time taken from the start of real-time bidding to the time an ad is served when the page loads is 150 milliseconds.

This allows media buyers to buy ads rapidly through automated programmatic buying processes, replacing the once tedious procedure.

The fallacy is that you achieve uplift quickly once you use programmatic, but even this machine learning plateaus quickly.

Audience data is needed to help marketers discover: where to buy ads, what messages to deliver and what time to send it.

There have been automated ad-serving systems for years, it’s the audience data that matters, but is still not the silver-bullet solution. Great creative is just as important, so too the best price for best ROI.

3. “First-party data is all I need” Audience data is classified into first, second and third-party data.

They all offer marketers unique insights, yet often, marketers believe that first-party data from their own location, transactional or CRM data is all they need.

First-party alone does not allow marketers to understand their target audiences beyond the realm of their websites, and because of this, marketers often apply lookalike modelling to create scale.

Overlaying second party data from publishers you buy space with (where available) offers greater insight into user behaviours and can cost nothing more.

What some marketers do not realise is that third-party data can achieve more of this at scale – without losing the quality of their data in the process.

But beware of the incremental price of acquiring this data so that it doesn’t impact negatively on your ROI compared to buying without it.

4. “My budget for digital advertising will cover targeting”

If you are in a position to use 1st, 2nd or 3rd party data, the central puzzle piece to an advertising campaign is a proper data strategy.

Without this, marketers cannot focus in on certain aspects, for example, your exact target user.

Although putting aside a budget for digital ads is a step in the right direction, marketers also need to figure out what percentage of their advertising spend will be set aside for actual targeting.

Having the budget for digital ads does not equate to targeting.

This sounds like a greater outlay and things just becoming more expensive, but in most cases the lower net prices one pays buying in a programmatic marketplace over single publishers means you are probably saving money whilst producing better results.

5. Marketers: “The more the merrier, when it comes to data”

Marketers today are blessed with the bundles of customer data which can be used to understand their target audiences.

However, resources to gather, process and store this data are required also, therefore an approach of gathering as much data as possible may not be the most practical option.

Marketers should instead ask which data will be the most relevant for their campaigns – and leave the rest.

Research by Forrester supports this claim; they found that only 12 per cent of data collected by brands are actually used.

Meaning that it is the quality – not quantity – of data is important to marketers.

Marketers can be reticent to handover their data to their media agency for fear of the agency accruing too much knowledge it might use at a later date for its own ends, but without access to that data and the insight the agency can eek out of it then the marketer will never gain the advantage it can bring. Sharing is good!