American Express caused a bit of a stir when it sent an RFP out to ad tech companies requesting they come up with ways to take the company “100% programmatic.” The company later told Advertising Age, which broke the story, that the prompt was intended to be inspirational, and that they don’t intend to go that far quite yet. But as a window into how AmEx is thinking about programmatic, it’s a bold statement nonetheless.
AD-Vantage took the opportunity to catch up with AmEx’s Canadian director of digital acquisition, Suat Alaybeyoglu, about whether the company’s adoption of programmatic technology has advanced as far in our market as it had in the U.S. According to Casale Media’s quarterly report on the Canadian programmatic landscape, AmEx has consistently ranked in the top 5 RTB spenders. Although finance is the third-highest spending sector, only RBC and AmEx have broken the top 10.
But Alaybeyoglu says AmEx Canada is a long way from going 100% programmatic, and a lot of things would need to happen before the company could even consider making it a majority of digital spend.
In fact, despite the large investment through digital AOR Mindshare, Alaybeyoglu says the company is still investing in programmatic more for its potential than its measurable ROI. “There are certain programmatic buys that we do that look good from an ROI perspective,” he says. “But we also want to do some tests to start learning about the environment.”
When asked what’s holding back investment, he points to many of the usual suspects: lack of inventory available via programmatic sources, underdeveloped measurement capabilities and pervasive fraud. At the top of his wish list: better targeting and the ability to measure unduplicated reach across channels.
AmEx, like other financial institutions, is in the unusual position of being equally a brand and direct response advertiser – a distinction that has become ever more clearly defined in programmatic. Alaybeyoglu said that for direct advertising, AmEx is more than comfortable bidding on the exchanges, where conversion-based optimization is a “no-brainer.” That’s where the company sees a clear ROI, with the many technologies available for measuring and attributing sales, subscriptions and other post-click activity.
But for brand advertising, the metrics are still missing. “I don’t think there is any good equivalent to GRP right now,” he says. “Let’s say your goal is to drive awareness. It’s really getting in front of the right people with the right kind of frequency. I don’t think there’s a good metric to measure that, because impressions and clicks can really be gamed.”
He said the quality of inventory on open exchanges doesn’t lend itself to brand advertising. For brand building, the company turns to programmatic direct – buying based on publisher relationships, but with programmatic audience targeting technology. He said he sees more long term potential in programmatic direct, at least while open exchanges still suffer from quality issues.
So when is AmEx planning to take the majority of its digital dollars over to programmatic? “I don’t think the industry is there yet,” says Alaybeyoglu. “Hopefully one day, but not now.”
