What is Programmatic Advertising

Taken from digiday.com 's article
WTF is programmatic advertising?

Klasmaya additional figure

Source: BI Intelligence estimates, Magna Global, IDC

Programmatic ad buying has changed the face of online advertising, but there’s still confusion around what it actually is. Here’s a primer, in plain English:

What is programmatic ad buying?

“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

Why does programmatic advertising matter?

Efficiency. Before programmatic ad buying, digital ads were bought and sold by human ad buyers and salespeople, which are expensive and unreliable. Programmatic advertising technology promises to make the ad buying system more efficient, and therefore cheaper, by removing humans from the process wherever possible. Humans get sick, need to sleep and come to work hungover. Machines do not.

So robots are replacing people? Great.

Yes and no. Technology is being used to replace some of the more menial tasks that humans have historically had to deal with, like sending insertion orders to publishers and dealing with ad tags, but they’re still required to optimize campaigns and to plan strategies. Programmatic technology will probably mean there are fewer ad buyers in the world, but it could also allow both marketers and sellers to spend more of their time planning sophisticated, customized campaigns instead of getting bogged down in bureaucracy.

Is programmatic buying is the same as real-time bidding, then?

No, it’s not. Real-time bidding is a type of programmatic ad buying, but it isn’t the only one. RTB refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions, but programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteed ad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites. This method of buying is often referred to as “programmatic direct.”

Is programmatic “the future of ad buying”?

Probably, yes. It’s impossible to tell what portion of advertising is now traded programatically, but it’s definitely on the rise. Some agencies now say they’re eager to buy as much media as possible through programmatic channels, and some major brands have even built out in-house teams to handle their programmatic ad buying as they spend more of their marketing budgets that way. At the moment, it’s mainly online ads that are traded programatically, but increasingly media companies and agencies are exploring ways to sell “traditional” media this way, including TV spots and out-of-home ads.

e-Commerce on Social Media (SocialCommerce)

Taken from The Internet Retailer

2015 Social Media 500

Meet the 500 Masters of Social Marketing
& Commerce in 2015

As consumers continue to spend more of their online time on social networks (according to comScore Inc., the networks claim 20% of daily attention spans), and as those networks roll out advertising formats with unparalleled targeting capabilities, e-retailers are massively stepping up their social media marketing, and Internet Retailer’s latest research shows that these moves are paying off. Indeed, the 500 leading social media marketers in the U.S. and Canada are fine-tuning their social media marketing and commerce initiatives to maximize their impact on their bottom lines. They collectively grew their social commerce sales in 2014 by 26.0% to $3.30 billion, up from $2.62 billion—well ahead of the growth rate of e-commerce overall in the U.S. (16.9% in 2013 according to the Department of Commerce)—according to the data in the just-released 2015 Social Media 500. As a whole, the data show these 500 e-retailers:

• Boosted their Facebook Likes in 2014 by 33% to 915.7 million

• Grew their Twitter following by 26% to 88.6 million followers

• Increased their number of Pinterest followers by 16% to 34.7 million; and

• Drove 78% more video views on YouTube for a total of 3.89 billion.

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Taken from pymnts.com

SOCIAL COMMERCE RETAIL SALES UP 26%

While retailers fight the crowded social media space to get their voice heard by consumers, a new report says social media is playing a larger role in retailers e-commerce strategies.

Data from Internet Retailer’s 2015 Social Media 500 shows that total social commerce sales reached $3.30 billion in 2014, which was up 26% from 2013’s $2.62 billion. Retailers also saw an average growth of 5.4 percent in 2014 in terms of total site traffic from social networks. The data also shows that those visitors are more likely to purchase once they click on a retailer’s site from a social network.

But driving that traffic isn’t cheap.

“Merchants are having to spend more on ads to have their content seen by consumers. That’s because Facebook shows fewer of a brand or retailer’s posts to its fans now than it did a few years ago, a strategy that effectively forces marketers to spend more on advertising to reach Facebook users,” wrote Stefany Zaroban for Internet Retailer.

Organic reach is getting harder for retailers, so they are having to turn to social media to help market their brand. A report from social analytics vendor Socialbakers said, on average, only 25 percent of companies are able to reach its customer base through organic posts. And in Internet Retailer’s research, of the 43 e-retailers that reported its social ad budgets, their total budgets were up 144 percent in 2014 to $17.9 million a month.

Data from the report also indicated that retailers have placed a large focus in increasing their social media audience. In 2014, those surveyed said their collective number of Facebook “likes” grew 33 percent in 2014; Twitter grew by 26 percent; Pinterest followers grew by 16 percent; and YouTube views grew by 78 percent.

Nielsen's Advertising Strategies

Taken from SharedThis blog:
Shared Conversations Series with Randall Beard
By Matt Wolfrom on September 03, 2014

Randall delves into innovative ad strategies to succeed in today’s fragmented media industry, the transformational nature of marketing organizations and the value of leveraging quality data to increase your advertising effectiveness.

Developing ad strategies in the current multi-screen landscape.

Today, creating an effective advertising strategy is complicated due to an incredibly fragmented industry, especially with the rise of new forms of media like social, mobile, tablet, etc.

The challenges that advertisers are facing in an integrated multi-screen world:
1. It is important to measure not only how well your advertising reaches your intended audience, but also how much it resonates, changes brand preference and reaction. In other words, does it impact behavioral sales? We call this the three Rs: reach, resonance and reaction.
2. Clients want common metrics in measurement across platforms. Although every platform is unique, in order to have comparability to allocate spending appropriately across platforms, you have to have common measurement metrics. Simplify success metrics with three basic questions:
- How well are you reaching your intended audience?
- How well does your advertising resonate with that audience?
- How well does it drive a reaction?

“Better, not bigger, data.”

For years many digital measurements like page views and click through rates existed, but at the end of the day advertisers and agencies were left with one major question: who did my digital advertising reach?

The ability to measure audience delivery in digital with traditional panels was virtually impossible, so we  partner with Facebook, who has the largest panel in the world.

To make the data even better, we take it and compare it to our cross platform gold standard panel. Then we put it through a calibration engine to make sure it is really accurate.

Reach consumers and understand  behavior in today’s crowded marketplace

The reason digital audience measurement is so important is because advertisers, agencies and media companies want accountability. When an advertiser buys 30M impressions against women 20-29, they want some measurement and a guarantee to know whether or not the media company or publisher actually delivered.

Another approach is through real-time optimization — moving money from lower performing to higher performing sites. In terms of reaching consumers and understanding consumer behavior, that circles back around to the reach, resonance, and reaction model, and using reaction to be smarter about who you want to reach. Being able to optimize real-time allows users to maximize performance of a campaign while it’s still going on, and before ad dollars are wasted.

One of the things that we have developed is the ability to do single source — bringing together a measurement of what people watch, including the ads that they are exposed to, and what they buy at the household level. We have a panel of consumers where we know what they’ve been exposed to and what those people have purchased in store, based on other datasets. We then match those two at a household level, stripping out any personally identifiable information. This data is anonymized and privacy-protected.

Impending advertising singularity  

Singularity is when computers and artificial intelligence become smart enough to self-learn and smarter than humans. There is so much going on in the world of advertising and media and it is creating greater automation and optimization opportunities for advertising effectiveness.

Increasingly you’re able to measure individual level exposure to ads and then match that to consumption of purchase behavior. By looking at what people are exposed to and they’re buying, brands can measure the individual impact of every digital touch point. An advertiser that’s bidding for 10K search keywords could measure the individual impact of each of those 10K search keywords for online and offline sales.

These advertisers can also measure the impact of all combinations of touch points. Many platforms have machine learning capabilities where they continuously learn about what methods are more effective. They have the ability to plug into demand-side platforms and drive real-time bidding. This is individual-level measurement of advertising exposure that is connected to purchase behavior and all updated in real-time.

Excellent partnership and foster with digital partners

To stay on top of industry trends there are two ways approach, organizational and cultural.

From an organizational approach, we need capability to address cutting edge issues. Create an advertising effectiveness innovation lab in partnership with University.  

Fostering a culture that is open to experimentation and external partnerships to solve big important  problems is really important.

Marketing Trends

There are three areas that are really important:
1) Data. Marketing in general is much more data and evidenced base, and it is becoming much more of a science. To be clear, creative, big advertising and marketing ideas will always be the foundation for great marketing. However, the rise of data and evidence-based marketing is a big trend, and getting the finance function to begin seeing marketing as an investment, as opposed to a cost line in the income statement, is essential.
2) Real-time. There’s a growing need for people that have the ability to be adaptive and operate in the moment.
3) Technology. new capabilities are enabling expanded opportunities in marketing that were not possible before.

The main challenge is how to advertise in a truly cross-platform in an integrated way. We’ve been very focused on bringing new tools to advertisers and agencies that allow them to plan across platforms so they can maximize reach across TV and digital.

ADVERTISING TRUST

Taken from nielsen article:

GLOBAL TRUST IN ADVERTISING AND BRAND MESSAGES
04-10-2012

The voice of fellow consumers continues to be strongly heard when it comes to the most trusted forms of advertising. 92% of consumers around the world say they trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth or recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising—an increase of 18 % since 2007, according to study from Nielsen. Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted source of brand information and messaging, with 70%  of global consumers surveyed online indicating they trust messages on this platform, an increase of 15% in four years.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

- Earned media sources remain most credible
- Trust in traditional paid advertising messages declines
- Confidence in online and mobile advertising increases
- Regional variances offer global marketers opportunities
- Improved relevance in advertising has room to grow

Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey of more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries shows that while nearly half of consumers around the world say they trust television (47%), magazine (47%) and newspaper ads (46%), confidence declined by 24%, 20% and 25%, respectively, between 2009 and 2011.

Still, the majority of advertising dollars are spent on traditional or paid media, such as television. In 2011, overall global ad spend saw a seven percent increase over 2010, according to Nielsen’s most recent Global AdView Pulse. This growth in spend was driven by a 10% increase in television advertising, with countries including the U.S. and China, attracting more advertising dollars versus the year prior.

Randall Beard, global head, Advertiser Solutions at Nielsen said “Although television advertising will remain a primary way marketers connect with audiences due to its unmatched reach compared to other media, consumers around the world continue to see recommendations from friends and online consumer opinions as by far the most credible. As a result, successful brand advertisers will seek ways to better connect with consumers and leverage their good-will in the form of consumer feedback and experiences.”

In addition the survey found that relevancy results often mirrored trust responses, indicating there is room for improvement by marketers to make a more personal connection with consumers.