Imagine that you are a Senior Marketing Director of a professional sports team in charge of generating more ticket sales. Or you are responsible for your car dealership’s online advertising dollars and theorize one of the most effective spots to spend your money is on www.cars.com. You wouldn’t be wrong and neither would the Senior Marketing Director of the professional sports team wanting their banners front and center on www.espn.com.
But, in today’s day and age this strategy should not be an exclusive one nor does it need to be. We live in an ever changing space with more data available to us than can ever be used. According to CBSi, there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data uploaded every day. Just how much is a quintillion? It’s the number with 18 zeros after it. So why not use this data to help deliver your message to who your target audience is and not just where they might be?
It’s a bit old-school to buy media based on content/product alignment solely and here are 4 reasons why.
- Back to Data: I’ll say it again….2.5 quintillion bytes of data are uploaded every day. Every day! Like it or not, your devices tell the big data companies everything everyone wants to know about you. It tells – those who want to know – who you follow on Twitter, what articles you read, what websites you visited, etc. As an advertiser, I want this information. Not because I have a need to stalk you. I want that information because this data allows me to have a more efficient spend because I am not wasting impressions on an audience that is not interested in my message.
- We are complex: The current worldwide population is over 7.4 billion. Not one of these 7.4 billion people fits nicely into a box. Every one of us has different skills, wants and needs. I myself get ads with content around B2B email marketing on NFL.com because even though I enjoy sports and spend time on NFL.com keeping up to date with football news, I have a career in advertising. Thus, this message is relevant to me regardless of the fact it is completely irrelevant to football.
- Simplicity is no longer an option: There is no doubt advertising in the 70’s, 80’s, and even the 90’s was much easier simply because there were no tools to make it complex. In 2016, there are hundreds of companies listed on the display LUMAscape; with companies are focused on compiling inventory, others on refining targeting options. There are others to help you track the performance of your advertising dollars and optimize at a second’s notice. The point being, living with the A + B = C mentality is going to put you well behind a curve you may never be able to recover from.
- Money Saver: Shifting money from direct site buys to a programmatic buy is actually more cost efficient and allows for more scale. If I need to reach software developers there are definitely a lot of publishers and sites that are dedicated to that audience, and they should be utilized. But I’m going to run into scale issues if I focus solely on those publishers and sites, their rates are going to be higher, and they are not going to be able to offer a wide breadth of opportunities.
There is no stopping programmatic. Joanna O’Connell, CMO of MediaMath was quoted in an interview as saying that in 10 years nearly every marketing touch point, whether paid, owned or earned, across the customer lifecycle will be powered programmatically in one way or another. We can’t be handcuffed into the old way of thinking that we absolutely need to always have content and product alignment. We have come to an age where there are other – some better – ways of reaching your audience without waiting for them to come to you.
J A Y B A R D E N
Associate Media Director
