Category : Channel Insights

By OppGen

Why Should Your Brand Consider Programmatic Advertising?

Learn more about the advantages of programmatic advertising

If you are currently running contextual and remarketing display campaigns on Google, you know they can play an important role in lead generation to help your business grow.

Although the Google Display Network provides plenty of placement options for most brands, there’s an opportunity to utilize a more advanced programmatic platforms such as Google Display & Video 360. Unlike the standard Google Display Network, DV360 and other Demand Side Platforms (DSP) allows marketers to access premier website placements that ultimately lead to increased engagement.

Inside Display & Video 360, brands also have the opportunity to target first- and third-party audience lists, as well as interest-based lists for affinity and in market audiences. Data providers such as Acxiom, Experian, Eyeota and many more allow programmatic advertisers to access their ready-made audience lists or submit criteria to potentially create a custom audience that’s most relevant to the advertiser. These audiences aren’t typically available through Google Ads.

If you’re looking to take more control of your data there’s a number of possibilities available. Programmatic gives marketers more flexibility over digital media across various publishers.

Ease Of Media Buying & Premium Inventory

With programmatic marketing, advertisers have the ability to purchase digital media inventory without having to directly reach out to publishers and incur administrative costs of negotiating a deal. This allows brands to target the placements they want and only pay for impressions that they actually receive. This automation makes digital media buying a lot more efficient.

Through open auctions, also known as “real time bidding” premium inventory can be targeted to improve engagement and ensure that the most relevant ads are part of the prospect experience.

Hyper Targeted Audiences

Prospect targeting is an extremely important part of any advertising campaign. With programmatic marketing solutions, advertisers can hone in on their target market by accessing pre-made audience lists through data providers with the ability to get more granular with demographic qualifiers within their campaign setup. Audiences can be targeted based on a number of factors including search terms, geographic location, IP Address and online behavior.

If marketers are unable to identify a list that meets their criteria, they have the ability to directly engage with data providers. A list of audience qualifiers can be submitted to data companies who open these lists  within the respective programmatic platforms to be targeted with ads.

Transparency

Within digital advertising, the concept and inclusion of the middle man widely exists. Many platforms that make it easy for advertisers to upload creative and launch campaigns without much of an understanding of the digital ecosystem keep their share without being too transparent about cost breakdowns.

Understanding categorization of can be extremely valuable for brands. They can identify opportunities to scale and share those with internal or external teams. This level of transparency can also help with future planning and campaign segmentation.

Faster Personalization

Due to the automated nature of programmatic methods, brands are enabled to deliver personalized experiences & messages to their audience based on real-time data. With programmatic advertising, you can have the foresight to optimize a campaign faster than the standard digital advertising model where the approach is much more reactive than proactive.

Improved Tracking Capabilities

Transparency is not only a cost value proposition but also a user tracking advantage for programmatic advertising as well. With a programmatic method in place, brands can track where an ad is shown, what level of engagement each ad size receives and what opportunities exist to reallocate budget in the right areas.

It’s difficult to predict what advertising will look like in the next several years, but it looks like programmatic is here to stay. Since 2013, programmatic has been growing in popularity year-over-year and is expected to reach a whopping $37 billion in 2019 worldwide. Our team believes in a multi-channel approach to make sure your campaigns are a success. When a campaign involves running both display and video ads through programmatic ad technology, we can help brands build an integrated view of their customers and show true return on investment.

By OppGen

When A Brand and Digital Advertising Agency Align

Why should you include your digital advertising agency in your marketing planning and budgeting process?

When a digital advertising agency is brought in to manage paid campaigns, they become an extension of the digital marketing team. For the agency, understanding the intricacies of a business and goals become extremely important in becoming a true partner with an ability to execute successful campaigns. There are monthly calls, reporting, and strategy sessions all in an effort to improve key performance indicators. It’s imperative to keep everyone on the same page to make sure advertising budgets are allocated on the most effective channels, brand messaging is consistent, and each campaign’s success is attributed correctly. 

When communication lines between the brand and agency are fragmented, the brand typically suffers. There are several reasons why it’s vital to keep your agency in the loop with internal conversations revolving around planning and budgeting for advertising initiatives. Here are some of the most important ones:

Align Team Efforts Towards The Same Goals

When there is consistency in a brand’s message across multiple channels, there is a  greater impact on the target audience. In the same way, when marketing efforts are consistently chasing a singular goal the overall strategy is accomplished.

It is not uncommon to see brand managers keeping their marketing agency in the dark about internal plans of new launches or efforts on print, TV, or radio that may not involve a direct contribution from the digital agency. However, each outward facing component of a brand has the ability to complement each other, which can be leveraged to pursue the same goals.

Getting the most out of your budget

Marketing coordinators or brand managers may take prior agency recommendations into account, but might not always know if there are more opportunities on new advertising channels and mediums. There are new channels, publishing websites, and media formats that are launching on a daily basis. It is not fair to expect an internal marketing resource to know the ever changing landscape of digital media. However, advertising agencies are part of that ecosystem and are certainly knowledgeable about where target audiences for a specific brand live online. Potentially, reallocating resources within the existing marketing mix may also be an option if major budget changes occur. Getting a second opinion can help minimize risk and maximize expected return for a brand. This can lead to higher efficiency with ad dollar savings.

Be more informed and prepared internally

Internal employees that are responsible for interacting with marketing agencies need to ensure that they are fully aware of what their brand should be doing on digital. Having this knowledge helps establish themselves as authorities on the subject around leadership.

Brands typically plan their marketing strategy a year out in advance. To propose a strategy that is effective and innovative at the same time is key to being successful within the industry. The advertising agency on record can support filling in any strategic or technical gaps to that strategy. By doing so, the agency would naturally be in the loop on what’s to come and it’s also a win for the internal marketing team.

Agency preparedness for new initiatives

Managing agency bandwidth is never a client responsibility. However, in a true client agency partnership, bandwidth considerations are important to keeping the quality of work consistent.

If an agency is blindsided by a large project with a tough deadline, it is safe to say there will be some unexpected growing pains internally. A client might not care about how the agency delivers but when the quality of work is at risk, it becomes something they should care about.

Keeping your digital ad agency in the loop on future projects alleviates the risk of having mediocre work done on a project. When agencies are part of the planning process, they have a heightened sense of what is coming through the pipeline and can make internal adjustments accordingly. This practice can not only help with keeping quality consistent, but it can also improve expected outcomes as more time goes into preparation.