![3December 2016
SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE
A NEW MODEL FOR AD BUYING TAKES HOLD
Big data, digital transformation and audience buying are changing the way marketers think about campaigns—just
in time for a rapidly evolving marketplace.
“In a world where everything from digital devices to cars and home appliances [is] being designed to intuit and address
people’s needs automatically, brands need to meet a higher standard of relevance and immediacy,” says Ekapat Chareon-
larp, global VP and managing partner for WPP’s programmatic audience company, Xaxis. “That means reaching people
with marketing that speaks to their individual needs.”
Programmable brand marketing puts data at the front and center of campaigns to target audiences as precisely as possi-
ble, even all the way to individual users. “With ad blockers, consumers are telling us loud and clear that they don’t care
about what we’re showing them. We need to move to a world where messages are targeted so well, and custom-tailored
so precisely, that [they have] content that people truly want to see,” Mr. Weide says.
Says Nicolle Pangis, global COO for [m]PLATFORM: “The industry is getting smarter about focusing on audiences, not just
click rates, and folding learnings back into the consumer life cycle journey. That’s valuable from the consumer’s own perspec-
tive as well.” Automated delivery helps marketers maintain the necessary efficiency and scale while delivering a seamless and
consistent experience wherever and however consumers receive messages.
Powered by new investments and innovation across the marketing technology stack, programmable brand marketing is
characterized by six key qualities:
•Automated brand campaigns
To date, the benefits of programmatic advertising technology have been more applicable to direct response advertising
than brand campaigns. While actions such as clicks and purchases are straightforward enough for marketers to track, the
only way to determine whether a given consumer has seen a brand advertisement is to place a pixel on the publisher’s
page. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to target that individual to continue their journey down the funnel.
Recent partnerships between Xaxis and both Facebook and Google allow the company to place pixels on those publishers’
pages, making it possible for marketers using the Xaxis platform to bid for the specific individuals they want to reach, rath-
er than having to rely on publisher brands as a proxy. This individual-level targeting allows marketers to move consumers
more effectively from awareness to brand interest to brand consideration to purchase intent.
“The industry is getting smarter about focusing on audiences, not
just click rates, and folding learnings back into the consumer life
cycle journey. That’s valuable from the consumer’s own perspec-
tive as well.”
—Nicolle Pangis, global COO, [m]PLATFORM
FOCUSING ONTHE CONSUMER](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/programmable-170412183139/85/Programmable-3-320.jpg)
Programmable
- 1. SPONSORED CONTENT THE NEXT BIG STEP FOR BRANDS SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE
- 2. SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE 2December 2016 Today’s marketers are increasingly embracing programmatic technology for buying and selling advertising. Yet as consumer lifestyles become ever more complex and dynamic, even programmatic advertising struggles to reach the right audiences in the right way for optimal efficiency and impact. Fragmented media planning and siloed channel buys lack the agility to follow customers as they move from screen to screen and place to place. Those messages that do arrive are just as likely to be blocked by recipients weary of irrelevant ads. Devices, wearables and the internet of things generate tremendous volumes of data that could improve targeting and personalization (Figure 1)—but marketers are unable to put it to work, leaving this invaluable resource untapped. There has to be a better way. And there is: programmable brand marketing. Programmatic was only the beginning, enabling automation within chan- nels toward the bottom of the funnel. Now, with 85% of buyers in the United States using some form of programmatic, according to Get Ready for the Age of Programmable Brands, a November 2016 IDC white paper sponsored by Xaxis, brands are taking the next step forward—and it’s a big one. “For the first time, technology has reached the point where it sup- ports brand marketing,” says Karsten Weide, program VP, Media & Entertainment, IDC. Powered by big data and cognitive learning, a new generation of tools works across channels to deliver personalized experiences that engage consumers in more meaningful ways at every stage of the customer life cycle—and drive unprecedented value for consumers and marketers alike. In this white paper, we’ll explore the defining qualities of programmable brand marketing and their implications for brands and agencies. THE POWER OF PROGRAMMABLE Data Science Transforms Brand Marketing for Unprecedented Personalization and Impact Figure 1THE INFORMATION EXPLOSION Amount of information created worldwide (in zettabytes) 1 zettabyte equals 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) gigabytes. Source: EMC Digital Universe Study, with data and analysis by IDC,April 2014. 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 0 5 10 15 20 30 25 35 40 45 50
- 3. 3December 2016 SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE A NEW MODEL FOR AD BUYING TAKES HOLD Big data, digital transformation and audience buying are changing the way marketers think about campaigns—just in time for a rapidly evolving marketplace. “In a world where everything from digital devices to cars and home appliances [is] being designed to intuit and address people’s needs automatically, brands need to meet a higher standard of relevance and immediacy,” says Ekapat Chareon- larp, global VP and managing partner for WPP’s programmatic audience company, Xaxis. “That means reaching people with marketing that speaks to their individual needs.” Programmable brand marketing puts data at the front and center of campaigns to target audiences as precisely as possi- ble, even all the way to individual users. “With ad blockers, consumers are telling us loud and clear that they don’t care about what we’re showing them. We need to move to a world where messages are targeted so well, and custom-tailored so precisely, that [they have] content that people truly want to see,” Mr. Weide says. Says Nicolle Pangis, global COO for [m]PLATFORM: “The industry is getting smarter about focusing on audiences, not just click rates, and folding learnings back into the consumer life cycle journey. That’s valuable from the consumer’s own perspec- tive as well.” Automated delivery helps marketers maintain the necessary efficiency and scale while delivering a seamless and consistent experience wherever and however consumers receive messages. Powered by new investments and innovation across the marketing technology stack, programmable brand marketing is characterized by six key qualities: •Automated brand campaigns To date, the benefits of programmatic advertising technology have been more applicable to direct response advertising than brand campaigns. While actions such as clicks and purchases are straightforward enough for marketers to track, the only way to determine whether a given consumer has seen a brand advertisement is to place a pixel on the publisher’s page. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to target that individual to continue their journey down the funnel. Recent partnerships between Xaxis and both Facebook and Google allow the company to place pixels on those publishers’ pages, making it possible for marketers using the Xaxis platform to bid for the specific individuals they want to reach, rath- er than having to rely on publisher brands as a proxy. This individual-level targeting allows marketers to move consumers more effectively from awareness to brand interest to brand consideration to purchase intent. “The industry is getting smarter about focusing on audiences, not just click rates, and folding learnings back into the consumer life cycle journey. That’s valuable from the consumer’s own perspec- tive as well.” —Nicolle Pangis, global COO, [m]PLATFORM FOCUSING ONTHE CONSUMER
- 4. SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE •Buying audiences, not impressions Traditionally, advertising has revolved around the use of media as a proxy for audiences; you buy the impressions you think your target customers are likely to see. Programmable brands eliminate the middleman and use data analytics to target consumers directly. This is especially valuable at a time when a single person might move across not only countless proper- ties within a given channel, but across an increasingly large number of channels as well, often forcing agencies to over- spend in hopes of catching the right person in the right place. “Having the ability to buy programmatically doesn’t mean that you’re doing so as efficiently as possible to reach client goals,” Ms. Pangis says. Mr. Chareonlarp agrees: “Rather than trying to guess where people might be, we’ve created technologies to unify an individual’s identity across devices. That’s a foundational capability of programmable brand marketing.” •Omnichannel marketing Omnichannel marketing complements unified identity management to break down the silos that have traditionally frag- mented media planning. “You don’t care about channels anymore, or whether your brand advertisement runs on display, mobile, desktop, connected TV or wherever else—it’s who you want to talk to that matters,” Mr. Weide says. Individual consumers can be followed across devices or channels automatically for more coherent campaign delivery. •Programmability Today, the bidding algorithms provided by DSPs are a black box to marketers: You can’t know how it works, only—af- ter the fact—whether it worked. With programmable brand marketing, vendors, agencies and even brands themselves are beginning to tailor their algorithms to specific campaigns and apply optimization along the way. “If you’re trying to reach a particular audience, doesn’t it make sense to have a tool that can program against that specific audience in the real world?” Ms. Pangis says. “The technology can make decisions throughout the buy, constantly feeding the data back through the campaign pipes to better optimize for the consumers we’re seeking.” Mr. Weide foresees the emergence of an open marketplace where marketers can buy or rent purpose-built algorithms, or even an open source ecosystem where algorithms are co-developed and freely traded. •Dynamic advertising Many marketers already use some version of dynamic creative optimization to show alternate versions of a given ad de- pending on the profile of the person who sees it—a hybrid car for a suburban parent, a heavy-duty truck for a contractor, each with a geographically determined local dealership to contact. The rich data and analytics of programmable brand marketing enhance the effectiveness of this tactic to determine the ideal mix of copy, visuals, offers and other variables for each customer, and to enable continual testing and refinement as the campaign progresses. A leader in digital retail media, Triad Retail Media, has partnered with Walmart and YouTube to put these principles into “You don’t care about channels anymore, or whether your brand advertisement runs on display, mobile, desktop, connected TV or wherever else—it’s who you want to talk to that matters.” —Karsten Weide, program VP, Media & Entertainment, IDC REACHINGTHE CONSUMER 4December 2016
- 5. SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE action for custom video spots. Sherry Smith, global chief customer officer at Triad Retail Media, says, “Our major focus over the coming year is to use retailer and advertiser data to enable innovation and optimization at both the brand and product level. In this way, we can reach the target customer with personalized product recommendations or offers in the most effective way, and bring back further insights to apply from the beginning to the end of the sales cycle.” •Attribution Attribution has long been a weak spot in advertising; post-exposure surveys with relatively small sample sizes and only approximate accuracy remain the state of the art. “From a design perspective it’s pretty clumsy; you do it because you don’t have a better way,” Mr. Weide says. Programmable brand marketing vendors are working to solve the key technical challenges in more direct attribution, in particular the ability to integrate back-end enterprise systems more easily with advertising platforms—a slow and costly process at this point. Adds Mr. Weide, “Attribution companies have made great strides in recent years, tracking more channels and even events. Give them a few years, and we should be able to achieve the real-time tracking needed to optimize campaigns on the fly.” HOW PROGRAMMABLE BRANDS MEET KEY CAMPAIGN GOALS Programmable brand marketing, which is quickly growing as a critical component in brand marketing worldwide (Figures 2 and 3), introduces new models and capabilities across several areas of focus that can help media planners maxi- mize results for brand campaigns. •Audience reach As with programmatic advertising, programmable brand marketing makes it possible to run campaigns across thousands of properties automatically, and to access potentially overlooked inventory with high performance potential. The tracking and agility made possible by programmable brand platforms expand the opportunities for experimentation by reducing its risk—underperforming profiles or properties can be quickly abandoned in favor of better inventory. 5December 2016 Figure 2PROGRAMMABLE BRAND ADVERTISING SPENDING Total worldwide spending on programmable brand advertising (in $billions) Includes programmable display advertising and programmatic TV and radio. Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Xaxis,The Birth of the Programmatic Marketer, November 2016. 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 0 40 20 60 80 100 120
- 6. SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE •Exposure frequency Omnichannel marketing solves a key challenge by allowing marketers to cap frequency and control sequencing holistically across devices and properties. Each time a marketer reaches a given consumer, the marketers can know which spots the in- dividual has already seen and deliver the next message in the progression. Bottom-of-the-funnel ads can be held in reserve until a given consumer has been exposed to branding and awareness messages; consumers who have already been primed for consideration can be led in an orderly manner toward purchase. “It’s now possible for us to look at marketing pro- grams holistically, taking a 360-degree view across formats and devices to convert customers along the path to purchase,” says Ms. Smith of Triad Retail Media. •Formats While it’s no longer necessary for marketers to decide how much of a campaign will run in a given channel—the system performs this allocation automatically—brands will need to have the full complement of creative available to fuel omnichan- nel marketing. Video remains the most effective format for driving attitudinal shift, whether delivered via desktop, mobile, over-the-top (OTT) or other video channels. Marketers may also choose to specify particular channels for a given message— for example, focusing buy-now ads on mobile devices in order to target the on-the-go consumers most likely to visit a retail location. Measurement and data insights can help marketers ensure effective return on ad spend. “You have to be smart and efficient about the different ways you can reach people,” Ms. Smith says. “Video is great, but it’s very expensive, so it’s important to use it strategically. Your overall program needs to deliver ROI that makes sense.” •Sales channels As in programmatic advertising, programmable brands can access inventory through real-time bidding (RTB) as well as through private marketplaces (PMPs). For the purposes of brand campaigns, PMPs offer the advantage of additional data, and sometimes pixel placement as well, to enable better targeting. Programmatic direct or automated guaranteed buys have typically failed to match the efficiencies and impression-level decisioning of algorithmic buying and selling, but the recently introduced header tag bidding technology offers new potential for guaranteed campaigns in which buyers can still decide at runtime whether to accept or decline each impression. 6December 2016 0 20 10 30 40 50 60 70 Excludes programmatic TV and radio. Source: IDC White Paper, sponsored by Xaxis,The Birth of the Programmatic Marketer, November 2016. 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Figure 3HOW MUCH OF PROGRAMMATIC IS PROGRAMMABLE? Total worldwide spending on programmable brand display advertising as a percent of total programmatic
- 7. SPONSOR CONTENT/AD AGE AGENCY RELATIONSHIPS IN THE PROGRAMMABLE ERA Scale is paramount for effective programmable brand marketing. The cost and complexity of building the necessary tech- nology will be beyond the resources of most brands and smaller agencies; the same is true for the creation and activation of a sufficiently large data pool to generate big data insights. “It’s not easy to build a programmable tool set,” Ms. Pangis says. “We have 250 engineers fully dedicated to the task, and we’ve been working on it since 2007.” The ability of an agency to provide data intelligence and optimization will be a crucial differentiator in the years to come. Agency relationships will also need to become closer and more real-time due to the condensed planning cycles of pro- grammable brand campaigns. “As data and insights speed up, communication has to speed up as well,” Ms. Pangis says. “Brands need to engage with their agencies to understand how these tools work and maintain a cadence of contact as the campaign progresses.” Ms. Smith of Triad Retail Media emphasizes the importance of collaboration from the earliest stages: “When you’re building a program, you need to have all the appropriate voices at the table—the marketer, the agency, the shopper marketing team—to make sure you’re pulling all the proper levers in the right ways to reach the established KPIs.” THE STATE OF PROGRAMMABLE TODAY—AND TOMORROW Programmable brand marketing isn’t just a vision for the future—many of its core elements are already up to speed and ready to drive value for brands. Big data, cognitive learning, omnichannel media and unified identity management are available today, if not yet in widespread use. In principle, it’s possible to deliver on the promise of greater relevance and immediacy—for example, a rising pollen count activates offers for allergy remedies, or a bright forecast triggers ads for sunglasses in mobile apps and on websites. The greater challenge lies in assembling the pieces and putting them to work. “If you’re on an Adobe DMP and want to connect your data in real time to dynamic creative from Sizmek, and activate it based on the customer’s current context, can you get those components all working seamlessly together?” asks Mr. Chareonlarp. “There are thousands of ad tech companies out there. How do you figure out which one can get it done? There’s a reason CMOs only average 44 months in their position.” The challenges are well worth overcoming. “We’re on the verge of tremendous changes in marketing,” Mr. Weide says. “We can already do technology-enabled brand marketing today, but this is just the beginning. As more and more of the things we use become connected—not just wearables, but also the internet of things—the amount of data generated by humans will quadruple over the next five years. And it’s going to be live data streams, not just static sets. Meanwhile, we’ve already seen such a proliferation of channels for media and services that it’s just not possible to do things the old way anymore—forget about having a junior agency guy working a spreadsheet. The only way to deal with the scale of data and complexity of the environment is through technology, and that’s what vendors and agencies are focusing on now.” Ultimately, as tools become more powerful, data grows larger and marketers gain sophistication, programmable brand marketing will draw ever closer to the holy grail. “It will eventually become possible to create and deliver these one-in-a- million messages for the right user every time,” Mr. Weide says. “That’s the longer-term vision—but it’s probably closer than we think.” 7December 2016
- 8. ABOUT XAXIS Xaxis is the world’s largest programmatic audience company that connects advertisers to audiences across all addressable channels. Through the expert use of proprietary data and advertising technology along with unparalleled media relationships, Xaxis delivers results for over 3,000 clients in 46 markets across North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East. Advertisers working with Xaxis achieve exceptionally high returns on advertising spend through the company’s proprietary media products as well as through its specialist companies, Light Reaction and plista. For more information, visit www.xaxis.com. WHITE PAPER Editor: Karen Egolf Writer: J. Daniel Janzen Designer: Gregory Cohane Copy Editors: Barbara Knoll, Richard K. Skews Cover Photo:Adobe Stock/chombosan CONTACT US Jackie Ramsey Ad Director jramsey@adage.com The Ad Age Content Strategy Studio, an extension of Advertising Age and adage.com, works with companies to help them tell their brand stories their way. Built on Ad Age’s heritage of editorial expertise and excellence, the Content Strategy Studio works to develop the ideas that create an emotional connection with customers. Through articles, blogs, video, microsites, research, events, white papers and other opportunities, it pro- vides end-to-end solutions for brands that will create the story that’s fueling today’s conversations. Storytelling for your brand by the brand that knows how to tell stories