Figuring out ways to take shortcuts is one of life’s joys. We use electric toothbrushes so we don’t have to expend all that energy moving our hand, we use Roombas so that we don’t have to vacuum our carpets manually, and we’re even starting to become a little lazy when it comes to advertising. It’s estimated that up to 80 percent of advertising budgets in the UK will be allocated for programmatic, or automated, marketing by 2018, and it seems we’re in an increasingly programmatic world.
The Birth Of Programmatic Buying
But what does programmatic mean for brands? Programmatic buying was, of course, born of the rapid rise in direct response advertising. Between 2007 and 2010, direct response advertising grew by a whopping 18 percent, and was definitely the talk of the town. Suddenly, direct response and programmatic buying went together hand in hand because both were focused on real time interactions. Through programmatic buying, it was pretty simple to measure ad success in terms of clickthrough rates, views, and increased traffic.
Evolution
However, the way we advertise is evolving, and direct response is no longer the hot topic it once was. Today, we’re all about brand advertising. We’re blurring the boundaries between digital and traditional advertising, as AT&T’s new cross screen trial in the States is demonstrating. AT&T are hoping to successfully blur these boundaries by running the same campaign across multiple advertising platforms, including television and mobile. Ultimately, we’re looking for more ways to measure ad campaign success both online and offline simultaneously. We want to know if people are sharing, if they’re talking, recalling, and so on. But how can we measure this in a programmatic world?
Improvements in Technique
Brand measurement, it appears, is something of a tricky task, and 84 percent of marketers believe that they’d be able to boost sales through better measurement, and better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. The good news, however, is that recent changes in marketing techniques are making it easier for us to determine our key performance indicators for each campaign, and measure brand and campaign success following programmatic advertising. In fact, it’s already being done.
Creativity Breeds Engagement
What it’s all coming down to is improved creativity and better consumer engagement. Through social media, for example, we now have uninterrupted access to our target audience, enabling us to judge responses regardless of whether direct action was taken. But we’re getting more creative than that, too. Vouchers that can be printed from programmatic ads allow us to link digital marketing with offline sales, while Nike’s Phenomenal Shot campaign used real time interactive ads to measure overall engagement. In the Brave New World of programmatics, we’re limited only by our own imaginations.