Gayle Smilanich, Kellogg Senior Manager of Global Media Ops
Multinational CPGs like Mondelez, P&G and Kraft have been leading the charge in programmatic media – and perhaps the earliest and most visible adopter has been the Kellogg company. With nearly 70% of its digital budget already invested in programmatic, and multiple case studies describing programmatic best practices, Kellogg has reached a level of digital media maturity that most brands aren’t even whiteboarding yet.
At the recent Brightroll Video Summit in Toronto, AD-Vantage had the chance to chat with Gayle Smilanich, director of Kellogg North America’s dedicated digital media Centre of Excellence. She’s in charge of overhauling Kellogg’s approach to digital advertising – from creative to media buying to analytics and budget optimization.
Smilanich told us that Kellogg’s core rationale for getting into programmatic has been that it shows measurably better performance, and not just for direct response.
“Ninety nine per cent of what Kellogg’s does is brand awareness,” she said. “Every once in a while, we will have a direct-response campaign where we will continue to leverage programmatic. But we have found it to be very successful in driving just overarching brand awareness.”
She said Kellogg and comScore have done numerous control/expose tests comparing direct-bought and programmatic campaigns, and programmatic consistently drove higher brand lift.
She even said that among the different programmatic strategies Kellogg tested, exchange-based audience buying outperforms premium placement. Although some advertisers and media worry that using data to target audiences across the web ignores the quality of the media where the ads get placed, Smilanich said that hasn’t been a big factor for Kellogg; site-agnostic targeted buys scored higher brand lift than did context- and media-specific buys.
However, Smilanich notes that programmatic isn’t one size fits all. What works for one category, or even one of Kellogg’s brands, doesn’t always work for others. Some of Kellogg’s brands have invested more than half their programmatic budget in private premium marketplaces, while others have almost all their spend in open exchanges. Much of the last year has been spent drilling down on what works for each individual brand, she said.
Here’s what else Smilanich had to say at the Brightroll conference:
Programmatic TV
“There are some barriers that need to be overcome for programmatic TV. It’s very specific to market – in the U.S. you’ve got different carriers, all with great data, but none of it can talk to each other. So it’s a very one-off solution right now. It’s kind of a bolt-together system.”
The Canadian market
“From a broad Canadian perspective, I think programmatic is ramping up, and hopefully we’ll see the hockey stick effect – it’ll ramp up much quicker than it ever did in the U.S. because everyone is leveraging learnings from other markets… I think the hardest thing for us to have cracked so far in Canada is the French marketplace, from a scale perspective… One of our biggest issues has been just the lack of inventory, and especially French inventory.”
In-house vs. agency buying
“We’ve taken a hybrid approach… We’ve had to expand our resources internally, as well as refocus our agency resources, and rely on [third-party vendor] services to do the day-to-day, hands-to-keyboard work. For data gathering and analytics, we have partners like comScore and Moat that help us pull the information, and then we meet with the agency and internal analytics team to decide how we should optimize… I think one of the big watch-outs for people potentially getting into the space is that it’s not a flip of a switch. There is a lot of work, a lot of nurturing that goes on day-to-day to get it to work well and to be successful.”
Viewability
“Viewability for us is almost table stakes. But we realize that not everyone is in the same place, so what we’re looking for is a willingness to work with us to improve over time and optimize… What I find enlightening is that there are certain publishers that are willing to hear from us and understand what our issues are and why we don’t feel like we’re as successful with them. Some of those publishers have actually gone out and revamped their sites to improve viewability, and it’s made us trust them and utilize them even more.”
