Welcome to the post-programmatic era, where data-driven audience buying isn’t just for online, but for everywhere.
And by everywhere we don’t mean just a few channels. We mean everywhere: linear TV, OTT, digital display, mobile and social, all tied together in one, cohesive package. In this era, you will be able to negotiate upfronts based on your custom audiences and then use auction-based inventory to fill in the gaps. You will reach new consumers, craft better journeys and eliminate the waste of siloed media buys with overlapping audiences.
This era is right around the corner. Finally, ad tech, measurement data and broadcaster adoption are evolving to bring the power of programmatic to all the media your team buys. But in order for brands and agencies to take advantage of post-programmatic capabilities, they must be set up to execute on it. And very few brands are ready… yet.
Here is your post-programmatic checklist: the three C’s your organization needs to do now in order to be successful.
Convergence
Think about your own organization: How siloed are you? Are your TV buyers on the same platform and sharing the same measurement with your digital team? Is your social team using the same data as everyone else? Probably not.
Your customers have converged their experience. Think about the way they move seamlessly from one media channel to the next, signing in on one screen and getting recommendations on the next. But if you haven’t converged your own data and your own operations, you can’t communicate with them across that media experience.
Once you’ve achieved that, here’s what happens: You’ll be able to use a single, custom audience segment across all channels, first targeting your custom audience in linear TV, then augmenting TV with digital and social, reaching audiences that have otherwise become invisible to you. And, you’ll be more efficient because you can also control for reach and frequency across TV, digital and social, eliminating media waste from buying the same audience with overlapping frequency in each channel. Lastly, you’ll give each consumer a better journey, telling more effective stories, moving them through the funnel more quickly.
Constraint
Now that you’ve converged your teams, tools and data, you are executing an audience-based strategy across channels. But the hidden key to success is how you manage your premium, supply-constrained media buys—how you plan upfront buys leveraging custom audience data.
Most brands still start with TV. No matter what you have heard, there is still nothing more effective than TV for brand awareness, product discovery and driving market share shift from competitors. Dollar for dollar, TV provides the most scale and delivers the highest return on ad spend for both awareness and sales.
So, continue using TV for the heavy lift of branding and share shift, but make it smarter. Plan your linear TV buys using custom, digital audiences instead of traditional demographics. You can then more effectively identify the coverage gaps or areas of over-exposure, and use digital and social video to fill in the holes.
You’ll start to see how much waste and missed opportunity you had before.
Control
Audience data is an incredibly valuable asset, but it is still under-utilized by most brands. By controlling which publishers you share with (and doing so while following industry best practices for consumer privacy), your data becomes the currency which defines your media buys.
Pricing then becomes a function of audience reach and the predicted impact of each impression. And defining what is “premium” becomes a mutual agreement between you and the publisher on whether targeting should be based on audience, content, or both. It’s the careful and controlled use of your data which enables all of your media buys to be blended together, from upfronts to auctions.
With command of the three C’s, you will be ready to take full advantage of the post-programmatic era. So how to get started?
Begin with converged measurement and analytics, and understand the incremental lift across channels, because you can’t fix what you can’t measure. Then use the measurement and insights to begin true cross-screen planning. And if your activation teams are still siloed, this is the opportunity to begin coordinating their buys and, using common audience segments across all media reduce channel overlap and media waste.
Finally, you’ll begin to integrate your teams for true, converged media management. What had been a silo for programmatic advertising now becomes the common thread tying together your TV, digital and social advertising. This is how you activate a true, omnichannel consumer journey, further reduce media waste and achieve the level of operational efficiency you need for long-term success. Welcome to the post-programmatic era.
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As chief strategy officer, Philip Smolin is responsible for driving Amobee’s global strategy and key growth initiatives that integrate data, analytics and programmatic activation to deliver industry-leading solutions for global marketers operating on the Amobee platform. A digital marketing innovator for more than 24 years, Philip is an industry expert on data and analytics, programmatic media buying, audience targeting and the emerging business models redefining marketing.
