advertising week programmatic pov

WHAT’S DRIVING PROGRAMMATIC?

APRIL 2015

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O VP WHAT’S DRIVING PROGRAMMATIC?

Everyone’s talking about programmatic, but what is it? And what does it mean for brands, agencies and media owners? During Advertising Week Europe 2015, we set out to answer some of those questions by asking a cross-section of specialists to join us for our panel ‘What’s Driving Programmatic?’

The panel took place on the YouTube stage at the BAFTA headquarters on Piccadilly in central London, in front of a packed audience of 180 delegates from across the industry.

PANEL

Wayne Blodwell - Head of Programmatic, iProspect

Rebecca Muir - Head of Research,ExchangeWire

Andy Mihalop - Head of Network Agencies, DoubleClick at Google

James Harris - Head of International Agency Relationships, AOL

MODERATOR

Arif Durrani - Media Editor, Campaign and Editor, Media Week

DEFINING PROGRAMMATIC

AD: ‘Programmatic’ can mean different things to different people. What’s your take on it?

WB: For me, programmatic means using data plus technology to drive cross channel marketing effectiveness.

RM: I agree. Putting it simply, programmatic is a way of using real-time data to sell and buy impressions automatically. It traditionally refers to online, so it tends to get confusing when people use it for non-digital channels like video.

A NEW PARADIGM IN MARKETING

AD: What effect has the advent ofprogrammatic had on your business?

WB: Last year, we launched a separate programmatic division which will soon have between 25 and 30 people. That’s a considerable investment, but our clients need that service to help them navigate the complexities of the programmatic space. Actually, it’s two services - a consultancy that helps clients choose the right technologies, and a management service that helps them run things. Once

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a client has chosen and implemented the right technology, it’s hard to find good people to operate it well. That’s why we’re building our service in that area.

Over the last six months, we’ve seen a massive culture shift. Traditionally agencies had paid social, paid search, affiliates teams, and so on. Programmatic goes right in the centre of all that. We’ve worked really hard to align with other channels, asking ourselves how we provide data for the search team, or the paid social team. Good programmatic is all about servicing data into all those channels to improve marketing effectiveness. It’s an area that’s growing rapidly and I expect we’ll see that trend continuing for many years.

“OVER THE LAST SIX MONTHS, WE’VE SEEN A MASSIVE CULTURE SHIFT.”

RM: At Exchange Wire, we conductresearch to help technology companies, brands and agencies understand thelandscape of programmatic, adtech and martech. Programmatic has vastly expanded the different areas we’re being asked to do research into. People need data and research to understand best practice, what trends are in different markets, and what to prioritise. Programmatic also opens up discussions around attribution, verification andtransparency.

AM: The DoubleClick view really is to develop an integrated platform, a unified platform that enables customers, and our agency partners, to leverage a single customer view, to segment and buy audiences at scale, across channels and across devices. It’s one of the fastest growing parts of Google. In Q4 last year we were growing at around 170%. It’s a great time to be in that part of Google.

“PEOPLE AREN’T COOKIES, THEY’RE STILL PEOPLE.”

JH: There were a lot of people who said that programmatic would be disruptive or devalue the currency. But if you embrace that disruption, it can be a really positive thing. When we talk about culture and code at AOL, it’s how the culture drives through to the code. The ad tech allows us to scale it, but fundamentally we’re still talking to the same people. I heard a great phrase yesterday, ‘People are not cookies, they’re still people.’ Connecting data to the real world is our mission. Programmatic shouldn’t be the strategy, it should empower the strategy.


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Andy Mihalop

“It’s one of the fastest-growing parts of Google. In Q4 last year we were growing at around 170%.”

Head of Network Agencies DoubleClick at Google

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Andy Mihalop,

“It’s one of the fastest-growing parts of Google. In Q4 last year we were growing at around 170%.”

Head of Network Agencies DoubleClick at Google

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HOW ARE MEDIA OWNERS KEEPING UP?

AD: Do you think media owners are moving fast enough? Do they understand programmatic? Are agencies and media owners collaborating well together?

WB: Some are, like AOL and Channel 4. Channel 4 are working with Dentsu Aegis and have allowed their video on demand to be 100% accessed programmatically which is a huge step. Yahoo! is another business working with Dentsu Aegis programmatically. Having these relationships with the media owners allows you to have these conversations. It’s about overlaying advertising data on a media owner’s format.

JH: Absolutely. It’s all well and good creating something that’s wonderful and a great brand experience, but I’m sure everyone else would agree, it’s when you can scale it that you have a real win.

RELEVANCE MEANS RETURNS

AM: It’s about relevancy in real time. Delivering the right data-led message at the right time, on the right device, is having a real impact on revenue and profitability. Large brands, like GSK or Nestlé are now investing heavily in

video to drive engagement or recall. That’s working very well in achieving their brand objectives. What’s really encouraging to me is seeing big brands investing quite heavily in programmatic.

RM: It’s about personalisation. One brand that’s doing this really well at the moment is British Airways. BA use visual buttons on mobile - perhaps a deserted beach, a glass of wine or a hot air balloon.

In ads the consumer sees later online and in the e-mail follow ups, BA use the images that you’ve already picked out. They’re taking a piece of very simple data - the image that person is drawn to, and then using their personal preferences to communicate to them. That’s a very advanced use of data, insight, audience targeting, programmatic buying and creative.

“IT’S STILL ABOUT THAT HUMAN CONNECTION AND SIMPLICITY.”

JH: There’s a ‘so what’ test about why you do it. There’s a huge amount of emperor’s new clothes, or as I call it, emperor’s new technology, in this space sometimes. What’s great about that example is that ultimately, it’s about the person, the device in their hand, and what you can do with that. It’s still about that human connection, and simplicity at the


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end of the day.

AM: Actually now, what smart brands are starting to do is capture and leverage all of these audience signals. This is actual consumer behaviour. Real-time behaviour is incredibly useful and powerful.

THE TALENT SHORTAGE

WB: It’s amazing we have all this real-time data coming in, but we need people to interpret it. We need highly skilled people who can create audience taxonomies and granular segments that make sense. Those folk are pretty hard to find. That’s why it’s become such an important part of our service.

WHOSE DATA IS IT ANYWAY?

AD: Let’s talk about data. Client-side marketers are worried about who’s holding it, and what you guys are do-ing with it. Are agencies like a black box?

WB: The Dentsu Aegis stance is very clear. It’s the client’s data, not ours. At any point they could move that data to wherever they want. But there’s a gulf between the expectations of what programmatic can deliver and what it is currently delivering.

into the same room to manage the conversation.

“IT’S A BIG SHIFT TO THINK ABOUT DATA FIRST, RATHER THAN MEDIA CHANNELS FIRST.”

Programmatic trading isn’t just a line on a plan, a black box. It’s a hundred lines. It’s individual audience segments. It’s scale. It’s forecasting. The classic ques-tion I get is, ‘We want to do some programmatic.’ But what do they mean? They think it’s a line on the display plan. Actually display should be a line on the programmatic plan. It’s a big shift to think about data first, rather than media channels first.

Changing the whole planning process around that is time consuming. It’s not easy. It can’t be done overnight. But the most forward-thinking clients we speak to are moving that way.

JH: I absolutely believe the role of the agency in programmatic is hugely important. This stuff is not easy. It generates lots of data, and it’s not going to analyse itself.

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– James Harris,

“I absolutely believe the role of the agency in programmatic is hugely important. This stuff is not easy. It generates lots of data, which is not going to analyse itself.”

Head of International Agency Relationships at AOL


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– James Harris,

I absolutely believe the role of the agency in programmatic is hugely important. This stuff is not easy. It generates lots of data, which is not going to analyse itself.


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AM: The agency has a huge role to play. However, it’s not one size fits all. For some companies, if they have that expertise and that’s the culture they can take it in-house. Look at Netflix. For other clients the solution might lie in owning their technology and their data but having their agency operate the technology for them. And there’ll be other hybrids I’m sure. From a DoubleClick perspective we’d want to support all those operating models as they evolve.

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES FOR DIFFERENT GROUPS

RM: In a piece of research we did earli-er this year, we asked people what their number one priority for programmatic was for the next 12 months. And when we divide those people into brands, agencies, publishers and tech companies, what you see is, going back to the earlier point, that publishers’ number one objective was to achieve greater scale. Publishers were putting their hands up saying, ‘We need to get more inventories out, available to brands or agencies or buyers programmatically, in order to drive our own revenues’.

“PUBLISHERS’ NUMBER ONE OBJECTIVE WAS TO ACHIEVE GREATER SCALE.”

For tech companies and agencies, the number one priority was data integration. They know that in order to keep driving performance, you need to integrate more data so you’re making smarter decisions based on better insights.

For brands, the number one concern was transparency and control.Which goes back to Wayne’s point about brands not necessarily having had the right people in the right room having the right conversations. And also the scaremongering that’s around in the media; that programmatic’s not necessarily brand-safe and there’s loads of fraud around.

“FOR BRANDS, THE NUMBER ONE CONCERN WAS TRANSPARENCY AND CONTROL.”

They’re not drawing on their agency teams to help them to understand what that is. We’re never going to get to a point where you’ll have 100% viewability through programmatic unless publishers completely change the structure of their websites and just fill the top part of their pages with advertising, which completely breaks the role of a publisher.

Overall, those four groups all want to work with programmatic. They all recognise there’s an opportunity there.


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But their priorities are slightly different. And the way they’re trying to get to that goal is down a slightly different path. It’s the role of the agency, a lot of the time, to bring those objectives together, in one room, to discuss how you can bring them to life.

“IT’S THE ROLE OF THE AGENCY, A LOT OF THE TIME, TO BRING THOSE OBJECTIVES TOGETHER.”

WB: I agree. Clients get sold in different things from different people that are going to ‘reinvent their business.’ They just want someone they can go to and say, ‘Can you help me make sense of all this data we have, all this technology, but in an impartial way?’ That’s why we launched the consultancy arm of the programmatic offering at iProspect. To help solve their business problems. As an agency, that’s what we’ve always done.

There are a lot of different approaches out there. Some agency networks have created a programmatic trading desk to serve the whole group, in some cases each agency has their own team. Other groups are simply offering training to help media planners develop their skills with regard to data, audiences and signals. The challenge is finding the best-in-class talent in a really competitive industry.

You need mathematicians and those who can explain things well to a client and make things simple.

AD: Let’s take this out to the audience. Do you have any questions for the panel?

“When you’re combining different data sources - particularly around social - what’s the best way to use those sets?”

- Audience question

WB: The biggest challenge is the walled gardens. Large so-cial networking sites don’t necessarily allow you to plug in data management platforms comfortably into their APIs. That may change over the next year, or two.

One of the things we try and do is prioritise data usage. There’s no point capturing all the data straight away, incurring huge cost and only being able to use five percent. You need to try and ramp it up over time. Think about the low-hanging fruit of data. This comes from having good conversations with clients and client teams.

It’s usually a roadmap approach that suits. You set six months, one year and two years as milestones and focus on good planning along the way.

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– James Harris,

“I absolutely believe the role of the agency in programmatic is hugely important. This stuff is not easy. It generates lots of data, which is not going to analyse itself.”



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– Wayne Blodwell,

(Clients) just want someone to go to, to talk to, to say, ‘Can you help me make sense of all this data we have, all this technology, but in an impartial way?’ That’s why we launched the consultancy arm of the programmatic offering at iProspect.

Head of Programmatic at iProspect

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JH: You need the right data skills for the field to progress. An open ecosystem is essential.

WHAT’S POSSIBLE VS. WHAT’S USEFUL

RM: There’s a real balancing act between what’s technologically possible and where the opportunity lies for your brand. For example, it’s possible to take your own first party data - what consumers have done on your site - and create, let’s say, three groups: loyal customers who buy from you regularly, people who’ve shopped with you a few times and those who’ve been on your site but never bought anything. Once you have those three segments, you can feed them into Twitter, or other social networks, and the technology can then match the accounts using the cookies of people who’ve been on your website.

“YOU ALWAYS HAVE TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE BALANCING WHAT’S POSSIBLE… WITH WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS REALLY ARE.”

Each of those three groups can easily be served a different, more personalised, message. So you can say to your loyalcustomers, ‘Thank you for being a loyal

customer, here’s a money-off voucher’. To those who have never bought, ‘Here’s 50% off your first shop.’ And that’s great. It’s personalised marketing. It’s taking advantage of data. It’s real time. It’s programmatic. It’s everything we’ve been talking about. But, if only 3% of your customers have a Twitter account, it’s completely pointless. You always have to make sure you’re balancing what’s possible, what the technology companies are telling you to do, what’s cutting edge and exciting - with where your customers really are.

WHAT ABOUT PUBLISHER ALLIANCES?

AD: What do you think about media alliances, for example The Guardian joining up with CNN and Reuters? Do you think publishers are increasingly going to start banding together to create private marketplaces for you guys to operate in?

WB: Yes. I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of it already.

JH: We have a content exchange platform we use - an open ecosystem that ultimately works to the benefit of everybody. There’s definitely a bit of a battle royal going on with things getting closed off. It’ll be interesting to see where that ends up.


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AM: For programmatic to scale, everyone has to win. How do we empower publishers with technology solutions to allow them to better monetise their inventory?

AD: Perhaps publishers may still feel they are giving away their inventory for less than they would like?

WB: We’re seeing some new standards that are beginning to help with that issue. How we’re measuring the quality of the imagery is improving. Attribution is changing. It’s not just about last click anymore. Auditing is improving.

JH: Technology has changed what we do, but not why we’re doing it. Rather than getting obsessed about the technology, content and context are still massively important. Our business is still fifty percent focused on how we build that culture. People are still, dare I say it, analogue at heart.

How can publishers and agencies improve the way they work together, especially around viewability?

- Audience question

WB: I would always recommend a collaborative approach, with expectations that everyone’s happy with.

JH: Yes. The term ‘viewability’ can also be misleading when you’re talking about fraud as the two are not mutually exclusive.

What do you think of the recent IAB standards of ‘half an ad for half a second’?

- Audience question

WB: It’s potentially quite limiting, for audiences as well as advertisers. Once people understand programmatic better, hopefully we’ll see a better framework.

AM: I agree.

JH: We need to have guidelines, but they need to be matched to the format and people’s behaviour in a practical way.

RM: That’s our view too.

AD: That’s all we have time for. Thanks to the panel and to everyone in the audience for joining us today. It’s a programmatic future. It’s going to be fascinating seeing that future take shape.


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Rebecca Muir

“So you have got to always make sure you are balancing what is possible, what the technology companies are telling you to do, what is cutting edge and exciting with where your customers are.”

Head of Research at ExchangeWire

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Rebecca Muir,

“So you have got to always make sure you are balancing what is possible, what the technology companies are telling you to do, what is cutting edge and exciting with where your customers are.”

Head of Research at ExchangeWire

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We hope you enjoyed the panel even if you couldn’t be there in person.

It was quite a far-ranging conversation so we distilled the hour down into our top eight ideas to take away:

1. Programmatic is the use of data and technology to drive cross-channel marketing effectiveness. Programmatic is about data first and media channels second.

2. Programmatic isn’t the strategy, it empowers the strategy.

3. Agencies, research companies, technology companies and advertisers are all embracing programmatic but at differing speeds.

4. Relationships and collaboration across the ecosystem (particularly between buyers and sellers) are still incredibly important to drive campaign success.

5. Advertisers are starting to value the data they are generating within their marketing. However, understanding and utilising this data comes with many.

6. There is a talent shortage in the industry. This is an area future-facing companies are investing in now.

7. There are several different models for programmatic. Brands might consider an in-house team, a hybrid team run by a partner or having their work fully managed by an external vendor. An informed and impartial partner can help with this decision. A robust business case and careful selection is crucial.

8. Expectations in programmatic need to be managed. Technology can be utilised in myriad new ways, but unless doing so delivers core business value, it is redundant.


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NEED AHAND WITH PROGRAMMATIC?

Smart, data-driven marketing can transform the way you do business. To find out more, talk toEmmaclare Huntriss, Business Development Director at iProspect. Get in touch today.

[email protected]

Tel: +44(0)207 492 2800Mob: +44(0)7525 223 881

advertising week programmatic pov

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