If You Give An Advertiser Trackable Impressions...

If you give an advertiser trackable impressions, he’s going to ask for his ad buy to be tracked and segmented across audiences, goals and placements.

When you allow him to easily reach his precise targets, he is going to want to measure the impact of each exposure and engagement. He’ll probably ask for real time reporting and optimizations.

When he does review the reporting it will raise oh so many questions. He’ll likely want to review ROI calculations and will ask about device targeting. He may notice that his results are defined by lots more than campaign targeting and segmentation variables so will take a good, long look at his offline activity and at all the applicable digital destinations.

So, he’ll start a website and social media audit for his company or brands which, many moons later, will lead to a new multi-channel web identity.

His web developer partners are hopefully marketing focused and will remember that he needs conversion oriented landing pages but he will certainly have new tagging and tracking issues to resolve.

Of course, this new website will be responsive and have dynamic content insertion capabilities so he’ll begin asking for device specific strategies and new creative to incorporate into display, social and search campaigns. But chances are that with all those things in play he will speculate about how to rationally credit and optimize conversions – so a fancy attribution report will need to be developed and the data trended.

If he hasn’t already, he might start requesting landing page testing and copy or creative testing now that he has more confidence in the ability of his destinations to convert.

While fine-tuning and optimizing his campaigns he’ll take a much needed break to read some scary industry reports. That will start him wondering just how much of his buy reaches human beings and how much is wasted on bots. At which point he may ask you for fraud detection in his campaigns. So you’ll find him the right partners and technology solutions and provide the reporting that justifies adjusted, effective media rates.

Once he is secure that he is reaching real humans he will probably want to ensure that those humans are actually seeing the ads you are buying on the pages they visit. That nagging question will lead to a prolonged discussion on viewability and the technologies available to ensure meaningful audience exposures. What is the right target to shoot for he wonders?

When he’s exhausted from tweaking the campaign variables he may circle back to ROI and wonder how to increase the efficiency of his buys. Ad exchanges, networks, platforms and technologies will dance in his head while he gets educated on the programmatic state of the industry today. He will likely wonder whether he can buy TV and other traditional media this new way and may perform a happy dance in your conference room when you tell him yes, or errr, soon.

The happy dance will make him thirsty so he will head to the break room where he will run into his boss who is not happy that he is not seeing ads on his favorite sites. Apparently the board and other non-digital C suite occupants have been wondering the same thing.

So the advertiser will ask if he can just buy the premium sites or ad units he thinks are a good audience or program match and that his boss and his board like to visit. You will assure him that is possible through private market deals even though the same audience may be reachable in other ways more efficiently and he sighs in relief.

So he willingly pays a premium for that brand security and gleefully takes screen shots on those A list sites to show his boss and the board, but then he’ll stand back to take a look at his total program and the hit his CPA may have taken.

So, you’ll set him up with a RTB program with lots of available inventory at attractive rates but when he is all done tweaking the campaign for devices and fraud and viewability and the latest issue of the day he may ask you where his program scale went?

And chances are if he is asking for scale in his digital campaign then he is going to want trackable impressions.