Advertisers with significant experience in digital media are sharing their experiences of what it means to go programmatic. CMOs for ING Direct and the Vancouver-based Coastal Contacts took the stage at Marketing‘s Programmatic Trading conference Tuesday along with Kraft Foods global vice-president media, data and CRM, Bob Rupczynski.
“At Kraft, all of our plans involve some level of RTB or programmatic,” said Rupczynski in his opening remarks. He explained that 18 months ago when he came to Kraft, the company’s chief concern in programmatic was cost efficiency. “I think that’s why people give into this at first, just to save money. Cheaper costs, cheaper CPMs.
“But I think you’re missing 50% of the equation when you get into it just for efficiency – the value you can drive, the connection you can have with the consumer.”
The three executives, representing a significant investment in programmatic buying, outlined for attendees the risks and rewards of the marketplace in the hopes of showing other brands the way forward.
Viewability, bots and brand safety
A the top of the list of concerns for all three advertisers was brand safety. “You get on sites sometimes that are not really favourable for brand opinion, and that is one of the downsides of programmatic,” Rupzcynski said. “It’s a downside that’s getting fixed quickly with blacklists and blocks you can put in, but it’s going to happen. In an automated world, where humans aren’t touching every piece of advertising and every site it’s going to, you’re going to have some of those.”
Even Coastal Contacts, a contact lens e-tailer that buys a lot of remnant display and was “doing programmatic before it was called programmatic,” is concerned about the quality of the content its ads end up next to. “Definitely, we ensure that the partners that we work with are putting blacklists in place,” said Coastal CMO Curtis Peterson.
Coastal and Kraft represent two very different approaches to programmatic, one focused on direct response marketing, the other on brand-building. Peterson said that for Coastal, bot traffic and low viewability are not major concerns, because it judges campaign performance on cost-per-action – the amount it spends on advertising for every consumer that makes an online purchase. Because all of Coastal’s business occurs online, it’s relatively easy to attribute purchases to ad impressions. Bots can’t fake purchases the way they can fake clicks, and consumers who don’t see the ads don’t buy the product, so by optimizing CPA, Coastal is effectively dealing with viewability and bot traffic at the same time.
The same is not true for Kraft, which doesn’t always have an obvious conversion to optimize towards. For Kraft it’s about messaging – which means that it matters how often humans are seeing its ads. In fact, Rupczynski says viewability may be a bigger issue for Kraft than brand safety. “I think we can address the black lists, ghost sites, things like that [but] the fact that 50% of your impressions have zero chance of reaching anybody, ever, is a bigger problem for us,” he said.
ING Direct CMO Andrew Zimakas says that his company is shifting its digital media strategy from Coastal-style DR to Kraft-style brand advertising, in parallel with ING’s shift from a savings bank to a day-to-day commercial bank. On both sides of that transition, brand safety is an issue. “With trust being a key attribute for financial services, anything that erodes that is a concern,” he said. “I think it will remain a barrier until it’s addressed.”
Buy programmatic media IN-HOUSE, OR THROUGH AN AGENCY?
Of the three brands, only Coastal does its trading in-house. Both Rupczynski and Zimakas said it didn’t make sense to invest the resources to build their own trading desks, especially with so much tech out there and talent so scarce.
“We’re very much in a test-and-learn phase with this technology, and that’s a key role the agencies can play with the brand owner,” said Zimakas. “They help us really understand, ‘What are we trying to achieve? What role does programmatic play?’”
Peterson said that Coastal does its own media buying, but he says his team is fairly small because it’s so difficult to find new staff. “I’m interviewing all the time for new people to bring to the team… The people that come in my office that have experience, or really any knowledge of programmatic, are pretty few and far between.”
Rupczynski said that although Kraft has no plans to bring trading in-house, agencies have to do a better job adapting to the programmatic environment. “Agencies are going to have change. We’re going to do away with some of the resources we’ve used historically, but we’re also going to dial up resources that we haven’t had on our agency team.”
Campaign strategy, retargeting and frequency
“Dynamic retargeting on our product pages has been bread and butter for us,” said Zimakas at ING. Dynamic retargeting combines retargeting, which helps advertisers message consumers that have already shown an interest in their products, with dynamic ad serving, which serves different ads to different consumers. With dynamic retargeting, advertisers can show consumers ads that highlight specific products they’ve looked at online or purchased recently. Zimakas said retargeting helps ING get a better understanding of its consumers’ journey through various products and services.
Retargeting is all-important to Coastal’s direct response campaigns, Peterson said. Coastal uses retargeting for display, video and Facebook media, among other formats, all handled by different retargeting companies. Coastal parcels out tasks based on where the consumer is in the purchase funnel. “Don’t just stop at generic, vanilla retargeting,” he said. “You really need to delve into the subject.”
For Kraft’s brand advertising, sequential targeting is the order of the day: a steady, cross-platform stream of brand ads carrying a step-by-step brand story. But sequential targeting also means putting a cap on how often a consumer sees the same ad, since high-frequency repeat messaging can be irritating. Rupczynski said that at the publisher level, frequency solutions are still lacking, which is not only an issue for performance but for spend efficiency as well.
“We audited 12 major campaigns across Canada and the U.S. from a frequency perspective, and saw huge amount of impressions at 25+ frequency, and a huge amount of impressions at 1 frequency,” he said. “The second struggle is, how do you get a frequency of 1 to a frequency of 2, 3, or 4. That’s really where we’re at now … I think we have the tools in place that address the 25+, which have saved us a tremendous amount of money, but that frequency of 1 is our next focus area.”
Have you visited Marketing‘s Programmatic Guide For Marketers, our new hub for all things related to this game-changing sector of the media world? Check out the latest news, plus video features with Acuity’s Katie Wolf, Exchange Lab’s James Aitken and Kijiji’s Mark Lister.
