Are you ready for social media’s programmatic shift?
Opinion
As social platforms seek to capture share from the open internet and differentiate themselves in a crowded market, they are developing new capabilities that could benefit brands.
Social media advertising is transforming, driven by technological advances reshaping how advertisers deliver and manage their campaigns.
With rising adspend, greater integration of AI and a demand for more precise measurement, social platforms are rapidly and competitively evolving their offerings to deliver better business outcomes.
Advertisers can expect plenty of new and improved ways of activating their social spend. This includes dynamic ad creatives, simplified toolsets, new formats, performance metrics and enhanced optimisation capabilities.
Platforms are also increasingly applying AI-powered verification tools to help address brand safety and suitability issues created by some user-generated content (UGC).
The most impactful of these changes is the deployment of open-web technology on social media. This type of AI-led media buying has become increasingly prominent over the past decade but has been mainly limited to digital channels on the open internet.
Directing bidding towards brand-specific outcomes, its development on social media is a significant departure from the platforms’ previous model. While AI bidding has existed in social media for some time, what is new is the increasing level of transparency and customisation, similar to that offered by the demand-side platforms (DSPs).
Instead of providing high scale but with the trade-off of limited transparency, it will give advertisers greater control over their social media strategy.
AI and future of social ads
The increasing availability of AI has underpinned the recent evolution of technology for social media advertising. Capable of analysing and digesting available media signals at scale and speed, AI is opening the door to campaigns that maximise performance and efficiency.
Powering dynamic ads from simple prompts, AI’s downside has been the concurrent rise of UGC, which can be unpredictable and, in many cases, unmoderated or very lightly moderated. This has posed challenges for advertisers in controlling their ad placement in these environments.
However, AI is also part of the solution. Advertisers can leverage AI-based technologies that scan video, image, audio, speech and text elements in real time, identifying those that fail to meet an advertiser’s brand suitability standards. Social media platforms are increasingly implementing these pre-bid controls to better monetise impressions on their environments.
Running autonomously, social media platforms are also adopting the independent thinking of “agentic AI”. This refers to the technology’s ability to plan, make decisions and take actions with reduced human input.
For advertisers, this means the algorithms can be trusted to learn from user behaviour, identify the best-performing creatives and adjust budgets in real time.
Social media co-opts programmatic thinking
This autonomy is also behind the growing trend of programmatic thinking and technology on social media. Open-internet DSPs were the first to introduce these AI-powered bidding tools, which began to scale in high volumes around the mid-2010s.
These custom algorithms moved the dial from the traditional one-size-fits-all models available through “off-the-shelf” algorithms offered by DSPs. Instead, they offer advertisers more flexibility and choice in activating their programmatic strategy.
They work by ingesting data signals, including first-party data, offline sales data and more, to dynamically manage media plans and ensure they’re tailored towards the outcomes that matter most.
This means quality metrics informed by attention, viewability, frequency, budget and brand suitability can be managed at scale. For example, exposure and engagement metrics, based on variables including viewable time, share of screen, user touch and video playback, can be ingested alongside trusted media quality and attention data.
This identifies the best-performing inventory for attention while simultaneously considering quality and cost.
A new era of programmatic social media strategies
At the time, these tools represented a significant innovation in open programmatic. Now, the industry is faced with another.
As social platforms seek to capture share from the open internet and differentiate themselves in a crowded market, they are scaling DSP-like bidding and open programmatic-style capabilities.
Brands can increasingly expect more flexibility and choice when realising their social strategy across formats, just like in the open internet.
Social media’s programmatic shift is well under way. As these solutions become more available and sophisticated, advertisers must ensure they engage with these algorithms to the same degree they do in the open internet to get the most out of their social adspend.
Offering heightened levels of control, this approach will strike the perfect balance between avoidance and opportunity.
Robert Cootes is vice-president, social, at DoubleVerify