Ad effectiveness losing out in programmatic gold rush
Brands and media agencies have been warned to stop “buying blind” as the ad industry grapples with numerous hurdles in the programmatic space.
“Programmatic is fantastic, but also problematic,” said Nick Manning, chief strategy officer of marketing analytics company Ebiquity.
“It’s the holy grail, but we’re not there yet. Industry will tell you that we are, but actually we know that for every $100 our clients spend, maybe only 15 or 20 cents in a dollar actually reaches the screen in a meaningful way. There is enormous wastage.”
Speaking at the annual RBS Media Conference on Tuesday (16 June), Manning – who has spent more than 30 years in the media industry and co-founded Manning Gottlieb Media in 1990 – said it was now the responsibility of media agencies, on behalf of advertiser clients, to improve viewabilty scores by lobbying publishers.
“We see a lot of ad inventory going through ad networks which is very poor quality, with very bad viewability scores and very high non-human traffic scores,” he said.
“The advice to advertisers is to be very careful what you buy…buy direct – you’ll pay a higher CPM, but it’s much better value for your money. If you buy on a blind basis, you might not even know where your advertising is going.”
The buying and selling of display ads programmatically continues to see huge growth, with a survey earlier this year showing that three quarters of marketers plan to increase programmatic brand spend in the next six to 12 months.
65% of marketers said that a lack of transparency is the main barrier to increasing programmatic ad spend, followed by the “complexity” of the ecosystem (55%) and “lack of appropriate measurements” (50%).
In contrast, increasing sales is seen as the biggest advantage of programmatic (cited by 75% of marketers), followed by the ability to personalise ad messages and to make use of CRM data (both cited by 65%).
Jamie West, deputy managing director of Sky Media, said on Tuesday that too often in the advertising market the decision to buy an ad impression is based on the yield margin or the ability to make money out of the impression than it is about the effectiveness of the communication for the ad campaign.
“Until the market moves towards making decisions based upon effectiveness then we’ll continue to have a market run by yield and optimisation rules rather than effectiveness rules,” he said.
“So clients need partners that will help them understand what is, in essence, a relatively complex market.”
Writing for Newsline earlier this month, Alex Kuhnel, chief operating officer, Kantar Media TGI, identified key issues the current programmatic landscape throws up for both brands and publishers, and offered insight into how they can be resolved.
“Programmatic advertising has seen a strategic shift from ad placement to tactics built around the target audience, meaning that online display advertising is increasingly driven by performance metrics alone,” he wrote.
“The perceived value of where ads are being placed programmatically is therefore becoming more critical to branding campaigns.
“Whilst advertisers must be confident that their ad is displayed where it fits with their values and brand image, publishers also wish to be assured that their premium inventory is not devalued by advertising from brands seen as non-premium.”
The answer for Kuhnel is for publishers to prove to advertisers “in a straightforward but compelling way” the value of the match between their inventory and the desired positioning of the advertiser’s brand.