Programmatic: More Than Just a Media Buy
Programmatic technology can be used for more than just media buying. It also allows marketers to test in a whole new way.
If you type the word “programmatic” into Google you will see more than 10 million results. It’s crazy to imagine that a new way of media buying and targeting has caught on like wildfire to the point where even print is now being programmatically sold. The efficiencies in media buying that programmatic offers have changed almost every consideration and operational process we have used in the media buying business. It’s exciting.
While programmatic buying can improve your online (and now offline) media spend, did you know it can also be used to validate brand target groups? The idea came to me after reading this easy-to-understand example of how programmatic works.
Advertiser Totally Tubular wants to sell more surfboards. It hires a programmatic marketing platform (PMP) which is able to identify online consumers by demographics, geography, interests, behaviors, time of day, weather, and device.
For Totally Tubular, these consumers:
- live within three minutes of a beach
- are highly educated
- consume surfing content across multiple devices
- on their lunch break
- on sunny days
The programmatic platform then uses real-time, first- and third-party data to identify the best online audience for the campaign.
It then buys digital ad inventory through an auction, one impression at a time, or if needed, through building direct relationships with publishers that have the right audience. The PMP reaches consumers in places they care about, across multiple devices.
While this example shows how efficient the spend is, and how impactful the ROI can be, it also opens the door to new opportunities for brand validation.
Consider this.
If your company is coming out with a new product and potentially targeting a new audience, but you are not 100 percent sure there is going to be a perfect fit, you can beta launch the product using programmatic to evaluate which targets are buying your new product and which provide the highest ROI.
The great thing about programmatic is, you don’t just have to use this for new products; this works well to validate who your digital/mobile buyers are as well. They might not be the same as your brick-and-mortar customers.
Technology and automation enable us to take advantage of an entirely new world of testing. It’s an exciting time.
