Programmatic advertising adoption has had a slow build in Canada compared to the US market, but is now gaining steam. In fact, IDC is predicting a growth forecast of about 50 percent through 2017. This slower growth could be attributed to Canadians’ tendency to be more sensitive to privacy and brand safety issues.
When programmatic was in its infancy, there was a general reluctance to pixel sites and track consumer behaviour. But over time, advertisers have come to accept it as safe and anonymous. Today, even the big Canadian banks are using programmatic as a core component of their digital strategy.
At the same time, Canadian advertisers are more cautious around brand safety than their US counterparts. They are focused on hitting the right publishers by exerting more control over the inventory where their brand appears. For agencies, it often becomes challenging to hit the performance targets they desire, while still respecting the advertiser’s preferred publishers.
Adoption of attribution tools
The adoption of multi-point attribution and third-party tools are helping Canadian advertisers break out of rigidly defined publisher inventories. Now advertisers can evaluate the safety and quality of impressions in real-time. This provides a level of confidence, as advertisers are able to set the threshold of what’s acceptable to the brand, and at the same time, open up new sites and relevant niche audiences they might not have otherwise considered.
Simplifying a complex market
As programmatic has come of age, the number of platforms, players and providers have grown exponentially, creating a large and complex marketplace. It’s hard to profess programmatic advertising’s ease of use and cost efficiencies, and then expect clients to manage a slew of partners. Companies like AOL are creating complete, end-to-end solutions (ONE by AOL) to help advertisers and agencies manage the ecosystem of partners and platforms.
Smarter, more portable data
Programmatic, like any digital advertising platform, lives and dies on data. Today, consumers are increasingly fickle—when, where and how they consume content changes constantly, resulting in massive amounts of data to consider. For instance, to build out an audience segment, you could be looking at millions of users and analyzing over 3,000 data points for each of them. But that data isn’t always transferable from platform to platform, prompting silos that make it harder to derive valuable intelligence and react to real-time data flows.
As both a publisher and a supply-side platform, AOL is part of a movement to create a more open data environment. With more open platforms, advertisers can simplify processes and consolidate data, offering a more holistic and transparent view of their campaigns. This, in turn, helps advertisers understand the true value of their data.
With full access and portability of data, advertisers can go beyond just inventory to connect with people – delivering greater value, flexibility and responsiveness in their programmatic buys.
John Erhart is sales director for programmatic product, AOL Canada
