Has the need for a brand to help create a pre-formed decision been reduced? Experian’s Colin Grieves looks at the rise of programmatic and the future of branding strategies.
It’s the age-old challenge for any company – invoking a feeling in consumers that they associate with the company name. No matter what the company values are, branding has been a key element of the marketing mix for years, with the end goal being to have an impact on the buying decision outside of simply product or service costs.
However, the prominence of branding could now be under threat. The rise of digital advertising capable of focusing specifically on a particular audience means that it’s now possible to directly reach individuals of a certain type – i.e. best fit customers who are likely to want to buy the product. This draws a question mark over the need for having an influence on that purchasing decision from a brand perspective.
Branding under threat?
In the modern marketing world digital advertising has the potential to be astonishingly accurate. By utilising vast levels of data and sophisticated online intelligence tools, an advertiser can pretty much pick and choose which people see its adverts.
It’s clear that cutting-edge systems and predictive analysis will drive performance, following customer journeys and giving marketers a great deal of detail to work with. Through consumer analysis and segmentation, brands can identify the types of customer they wish to target in a highly effective manner, given the level of modern data available. This results in greater efficiency, effectiveness and relevancy – the latter resulting in an improved customer experience when it comes to receiving and engaging with marketing messages.
The increasing proliferation of programmatic capabilities now takes this further with automated and real-time evaluations of browsers enabling the most relevant adverts to be shown. With this in mind, combined with the level of effort and investment required to build a strong brand, some critics feel that the need for a brand to help create a pre-formed decision is reduced. Largely because advertisers now have the ability to put relevant ads only in front of people who are highly likely to actually want to buy that product.
Building the brand through programmatic
Programmatic buying is about using a brief window to get a customer’s attention. Sophisticated algorithms can tell a great deal about a browser just from their history and behaviour, including at what stage of the buying process they are.
As a result, programmatic is suited to driving actions and conversions in direct-response advertising. Using it for branding purposes, with adverts without a specific call to action, could therefore be seen as a waste of money – money which could be ploughed into campaigns which are instantly measurable in terms of success.
These factors are the reason many organisations may be reluctant to run branding-specific programmatic campaigns. In my experience running a branding campaign that has no KPI other than ‘raise awareness of the brand’ can be difficult for digitally-focused marketers to understand and fully embrace.
In spite of this, the role programmatic should play in branding is not necessarily defined as minimal. Instead, we need to think how we measure success and how we manage spend across channels to deliver the goal.
Programmatic and branding strategy
The bottom line is that brand marketers must ensure the brand story is told across the customer journey over all channels. To say programmatic should be excluded from the brand story would be naïve, as it’s not as cut and dry as being a choice between programmatic and branding.
Instead, programmatic is a channel that needs to be incorporated and not treated separately. Yes, there’s the temptation to concentrate programmatic spend on direct response campaigns but branding strategy needs to incorporate all aspects and touch points into the brand story.
While there is the potential for programmatic to contradict some of the wider brand messages an organisation is looking to promote, incorporating it into the overall branding strategy will help to negate this possibility.
The branding strategy needs to inform the messaging, tone and style of all communication, including programmatic advertising. Programmatic media buying can be an effective component of a branding strategy, not the whole piece, and using it as a separate channel to push single CTA ads would mean a lost opportunity to reinforce brand message.
Companies need to make better use of their marketing spend and ensure the right elements of programmatic advertising are added and included in the branding strategy, which will then help improve brand awareness.
The bottom line is that every time you communicate with a consumer, it’s the brand they see. Therefore successful branding campaigns must involve strategy and cross-channel outreach – any marketing budget that doesn’t have an impact on brand awareness is budget that is not being effectively invested.
Colin Grieves is general manager, Experian Digital Media.
