Bosko Milekic co-founded Montreal-based AdGear back in 2008. Today marketers and agencies use AdGear’s demand-side platform for 4% of domestic trades.
It’s no secret that in programmatic ad tech, we are comfortable with direct response. What we really need to figure out is how to make media buying and selling radically better for brand campaigns.
There is an obvious reason for our comfort with direct –- the metrics to enable decision making at scale are pretty obvious, so obvious that we’ve trained machines to do a lot of the optimization legwork for us. We have deep insights into most of the channels in the online consumer’s path to conversion, we have good metrics like indirect and direct cost-per-action, and in many cases we can get at true return on investment.
So, when it comes to doing DR campaigns, we’re increasingly well equipped. Sure, there are still challenges to be addressed, like bridging desktop and mobile channels and avoiding poor quality traffic –but these pale in comparison to the challenges of bringing brand dollars into programmatic.
Better metrics for outcome would help, for a start. Despite the quality we’ve achieved in DR attribution and optimization, “conversions” are often unavailable or, worse, irrelevant when measuring how well we’ve engaged the target audience of a large-scale brand campaign.
Better metrics for viewability would also help. That means more than just “in view” or “not in view”. There’s an assortment of angles to look at it from, like the cumulative time an ad spends on-screen, or the average time a user hovers over it. We can look at interaction heat maps, which depict how aggregate users have interacted with the advertiser’s creative.
These metrics all allow for some quantification and differentiation in an otherwise bland ad ecosystem. We can also tally them historically, to make better programmatic decisions at auction time.
With its hyper-targeting and abundance of choice, DR evolved to help sales staff close sales in the short term. But the focus on “more clicks, more conversions, higher performance” is shortsighted if your goal is to be noticed, reinforce a position and message, or constructively engage your target demographic
Clearly, for brand campaigns more is not always better. Differentiating media properties and brands from one another is important, and numbers take on a different role when it comes to making good buying decisions. Clicks and conversions still have their place, but we need to better acknowledge when they’re actually meaningful.
Some programmatic marketplaces understand that branding is different from DR, and they’re transforming themselves from giant pools of impressions to real, complete marketplaces. Look for exchanges that expose meaningful brand data on sellers and buyers, with greater transparency. Those will be the players that ultimately enable deeper and richer connections between sellers, buyers, and the brands that they service.
