“We’re in the first inning of a baseball game.” That’s how Paul Burns, vice-president of digital media at Shaw Communications, summed up the state of RTB adoption in Canada today.
But that doesn’t mean an epic home run isn’t coming soon. Burns was one of several CEOs on a panel at Marketing’s Real-Time Bidding Executive Spotlight conference in Toronto on Tuesday morning. Part of the panel covered where RTB stands in Canada now and what’s needed to move ahead.
It’s a nascent model, said Andrew Casale, vice-president of strategy at Casale Media, but the panelists explained that it shows a lot of promise for targeting the right audiences at the right time with the right messages.
To give some perspective on who is buying through the RTB model today in Canada (as of Q4 2012), Casale noted that there are 500 brands buying this way within 25 product categories. The biggest category by spend in Canada is retail, he added, a segment he believes will grow in the year ahead.
A mere 10 brands accounted for 45% of total RTB spend in Canada in the Q4 period, said Casale. Early thought leaders are doing great things in the space, added Burns, but there’s a lot of room for growth.
For those looking to get into RTB, the panelists discussed the merits of using several platforms so that you can get back into auctions. Using multiple DSPs requires staff training, and each platform has a different way of responding so bidding strategies change by platform, said Tessa Ohlendorf, managing director at Cadreon, a specialized marketing services platform.
Mark Lister, director of sales at Kijiji, described RTB as opening “the big black box” of new customers. It’s about data, but it’s also about timing and relevance, he said. Someone may be interested, for example, in buying wine on a Friday night, but on Monday that same person is no longer interested in wine because they have a hangover. When the next Friday rolls around, they’ll be looking to buy wine again.
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Beyond how RTB can help target consumers at the right time, one of the big issues around RTB today is the safety concerns brands have about where their ads will end up, and protecting their name. “Brand safety is a critical component to what buyers need,” said Burns.
There’s talk of putting a code of conduct in place for RTB suppliers, but until that arrives it’s up to humans to communicate about the process, said Casale. “We promote buy and sell talking together rather than it being totally automated,” he said.
In addition to brand safety, another critical component to think of around RTB is scale, added Burns. Buyers have technology and data sets to find the needle in the haystack and the Canadian Premium Audience Exchange (CPAX) – the online bidding exchange service that Shaw Media, Rogers Media and CBC/Radio-Canada created roughly a year ago to allow advertisers and agencies to buy digital inventory from them—is there to “expose more needles,” he said. But scale is needed to do so.
Taking advertiser data and pairing it with publisher data and the issue of how you enable that to take scale is key to the equation, he said.
Moderator Paula Gignac, digital marketing expert and former president of IAB Canada, asked Ohlendorf to summarize the best set-up for successful programmatic buying. A good working relationship between the publisher, DSP and advertisers is needed to make a campaign work, said Ohlendorf.
