Why you Need to Understand Programmatic Marketing

“Everyone seems to be talking about programmatic advertising, but there’s so much hype and stuff that looks like flim-flam that, after reading what marketing firms put out on their websites, I’m more confused than ever about what it is.”

Fair comment.  Programmatic marketing is clever stuff, but at its core it’s fundamentally simple.

First of all, it’s not always as expensive as many people think.  Mitigation of spend can be achieved by thinking things through – as long as you don’t think too narrowly, but I’ll come back to that shortly.

Freedom of Information

Internet user statistics have become more detailed as we (users) send more information into the web by visiting websites, specific pages, opening up images, watching videos and vines, making comments on social media posts and creating your own tagged posts.  The amount of information most of us individually give away about our likes, dislikes, colour preferences, clothing size, cars we drive and gadgets we own or aspire to acquire is phenomenal.  We shouldn’t really be surprised when ads begin to appear in banners and sidebars that directly resonate with us.  We should be more surprised when we see ads that have no relevance to us.

Reversing the Viewpoint

Let’s look at it from your perspective – or rather the perspective of you as a mythical consumer.  Your mobile device tracks where you go and when.  Your service provider stores the location data, as does Apple your transaction when you use your Apple device to pay for a Frappuccino using Apple Pay.  You see a great sofa in the coffee shop and post it up using Instagram.  Later in the day you add it to Pinterest with the question “Has anyone seen these for sale?”.  You may also add it to Facebook.  That’s three furniture-related interactions in a day.

Your Number’s Up

You’ve become a red flag statistic – you have some disposable income (hence the expensive coffee drink) and you’re interested in a new sofa.  With all the other information gathered about you (age range, income bracket, gender, relationship status, holiday destinations etc) someone who sells furniture is going to ‘buy’ you, together with a lot of other people that fall into their categorised preferences, as an audience for their furniture ads.

Mitigating Spend

Just as with television and holidays, the online world is segmented into several time zones that vary in popularity and, therefore, vary in price.  Less popular times cost less but are likely to reach a smaller audience.  Categorisation of audience can also reduce costs, but care should be taken not to exclude some of your target audience by categorising too narrowly.  As with almost all elements of life, you can have everything only if you’re prepared to pay for it.

In a Nutshell

That’s what programmatic marketing is, pre-buying opportunities to engage a hopefully receptive audience to ads designed specifically to appeal and create engagement.

Now you know a bit more it’s time to chat to us about how we can help your business to use it.

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