What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising is an incredibly versatile marketing tactic that can place your campaigns across different mediums and platforms.
The demand-side platform (DSP) strategy has created a world where a single, knowledgeable marketing expert can launch a fully integrated campaign across streaming platforms, television, the web, and more, delivering targeted, relevant content directly to your desired audiences.
How does programmatic advertising work?
At its core, programmatic advertising is able to take advantage of the nearly countless user and consumer data points we now have available to us and combines them with advanced audience and retargeting tools to ensure that our campaigns are relevant, and essentially pushes them across the various advertising formats applicable to those consumers.
With programmatic advertising, you have the same dynamic capabilities as you would with tactics like paid social and search advertising, such as the ability to make adjustments on the fly based on real-time data and ROI feedback. But the truly mind-blowing advancement? In addition to the above, DPSs enable you to integrate your campaigns into even more mediums like TV, podcasts, and native news articles, increasing the reach of your campaigns and, with the right strategy, also increasing your conversions.
Modern-day DSPs act like virtual auction houses, using machine learning and artificial intelligence that serves your content in a real-time, seconds-long bidding session. When managed strategically by a marketing expert, you can achieve the best, highest-quality ad placements possible, reaching relevant — and receptive — users at exactly the right time and place.
While some think that programmatic is a fully automated process, there are actually a lot of backend settings and frameworks that need to be built in order to make your campaigns effective.
Why we’ve made a strategic investment in programmatic advertising for our clients
- It’s effective, efficient, and relevant — The advanced nature of the programmatic bidding system ensures your ad dollars are being spent as efficiently and effectively as possible. It streamlines a media-buying process that used to take days (possibly even weeks or months!) of planning and communication into the span of just a few milliseconds. Your reach is extended from one single placement option to quite literally thousands to find the statistically near-perfect set of eyes.
- You have increased control over ad placement — When working with a DSP, you have access to a diverse option of ad inventory and placements. This is more than just choosing whether you want your ad to show up as a banner or a native ad. You can even choose brand safety implementations and set content classifications to ensure your placement type is just the style and context you’re looking for for your business, aligning your brand with brands that share the values of you and your customers.
- Real-time data allows for real-time adjustments — To a nearly unprecedented degree, your ads can be constantly analyzed, adjusted, and optimized to ensure that every cent of your ad budget is being spent in a way you’re comfortable with. With every ad impression you get, you’re learning more about your users, building more specific audiences for future campaigns, and collecting critical info housed in a single platform that will help you make better, data-driven decisions long-term.
Why haven’t I heard much about programmatic advertising?
Sometimes it can feel like there’s a new silver bullet in marketing and advertising every single day, but a lot of them tend to be more hype than an enduring tactic. Remember when QR codes were going to revolutionize marketing, but have essentially become a means for accessing menus on our smartphones? The marketing world can be like that.
However, with programmatic advertising and DSP, a lot of brands might be shying away from it because, honestly, it’s a pretty complicated tactic. But this is precisely why you should pull in a trusted, proven agency as a partner to help you navigate the process while managing and deploying your ad dollars.
And, like much technology that has come before it, it’s taken time for DSP technology to reach a level of sophistication, reliability, and ease of use that makes it scalable for businesses of all sizes.
Is programmatic advertising a good investment for my business?
Like some of you, we always assess new marketing technology and tactics with healthy skepticism. We’ve also had experience in multiple different DSPs so we can shine light on why our service partner of choice might be better than another one. We never want to get caught in a trend and ask our clients to make poor investments.
We’ve taken the time to educate ourselves on the subject, assess different platforms, and come to real-world conclusions about the value of programmatic.
Our take? It really is an amazing technology! And now that it’s become a pretty standard tactic across the board for some of the biggest, fastest-growing, and most successful companies on Earth, it’s even more realistic for businesses of just about every size to invest in.
While it’s not cheap, per se, programmatic advertising is more accessible than you might think. What’s more, it’s really all about how solid of a strategy you have to make sure that the proposed placement and budget parameters works for you and your business!
In our assessment, programmatic will help distinguish you from the competition, because it helps companies build distinct audiences to market to, based on the millions of data points used to identify the where, when, and what of your campaigns and gives your marketing visibility with more modern placements that your typical digital marketing ad options might not allow for, like podcasts, ConnectedTV, and what’s called Digital Out of Home — essentially digital billboards.
So if you’re interested in moving past commonplace and traditional advertising placements that are already saturated with competition, programmatic is a great way to distinguish your brand and keep your businesses on the cutting edge.
More reasons programmatic advertising is your brand’s next best investment
- Consider consumer habits — Users are traveling a lot during the summer and might be spending less time on social media or sitting on their phones and computers, making programmatic a good opportunity to reach them out in the world in additional areas and placements beyond your standard local and regional placements
- The future of programmatic tech is bright — like many things, programmatic advertising will be subject to the power of well-crafted AI strategies, maybe more so than a lot of technologies. It already uses AI to suggest optimizations, optimize placements and bidding, and to find and bid on what it finds to be relevant placements. Even some of the more manually driven tasks, like ad content and creative, could be absorbed by AI in the future, as well.
- There are “guardrails” in place to protect your brand’s integrity — The brand safety piece is something that is particularly attractive to us. Without careful guidelines and content or topic exclusions/restrictions, there’s a good chance your ad can accidentally show up on a site that you don’t want it to. DSPs can solve this problem and protect your brand’s integrity while delivering you the customers you deserve.
Consider Formada for your brand’s programmatic needs
Why Formada? We’re a full-service agency that’s transparent and informative about the value and relevance of our services, and believe in being good stewards of our clients’ ad budgets.
We never ask for your ad dollars and say “trust us.” We take our role very seriously and act as more than just the liaison between you and your ad placements. Our ideal relationship with our clients is a partnership — we want to provide you with as much information and as many options as possible so you can make decisions confidently, while we do the heavy lifting on your behalf.
We work with businesses of all sizes, from small to enterprise organizations, so we have expertise in deploying ad dollars creatively and effectively in order to make tactics like programmatic work for your brand.
Ready to learn more about how your business can generate more customers through programmatic advertising? Contact us today for your free consultation!