Paving possibilities the programmatic way

• We stand today at an interesting point in time in the advertising world, writes Mitch Waters, SVP, The Trade Desk.
• He further shares how growing momentum for data-based advertising across the world and the emergence of new advertising models on the open internet present us with an opportunity to transform the digital advertising industry and create a system in which marketers, content creators and consumers are winners.

Marketing has always been a crucial driver of growth and a means for businesses to differentiate themselves. In the wake of the operational and financial disruptions witnessed over the past year, marketing teams are under greater pressure to prove return on investment (ROI) of every advertising dollar. This is amidst the ongoing changes in areas like data privacy, identity protection, and consumer media behaviour they must grapple with. With all this in mind, it’s no surprise that more modern marketers are embarking on programmatic advertising, leveraging the power of data to help them deliver more relevant ads, while simultaneously havingthe ability to measurecampaign success.

Embracing opportunities on the open internet

A study by Global Web Index revealed that Indians, on average, are spending as many as eight hours a day online – 70 percent is spent on the open internet, which includes online content, over-the-top (OTT) and music streaming. Furthermore, the open internet is growing at a faster rate than even social media. Online content and OTT streaming grew at 28 percent and 16 percent respectively, while social media grew by a mere 1 percent.

This is an important moment in the evolution of digital advertising. Marketers now have the opportunity to address a wide range of emerging opportunities on the open internet, from the rise of OTT consumption, to striking the right balance between privacy and relevant advertising. Here are three simple, but powerful guidelines for marketers to find their next million customers on the open internet:

Utilising advanced goal-based media buying

Given the vast number of choices consumers have, it’s no surprise that consumers’ media consumption is increasingly varied and fragmented across online channels, streaming platforms and digital devices. Meanwhile, marketers are expected to deliver campaigns with specific business outcomes,while operating in a highly volatile environment amidst stiff competition and limited budgets.

Getting the ad placement exactly right at any given time, therefore, is almost impossible without applying data and technology. A sophisticated media buying platform like The Trade Desk - with its new upgrade, Solimar - brings the maximum amount of smart decisioning to every single ad impression, based on clear goals set at the start of a campaign. It allows marketers to be more strategic: rather than managing thousands of campaign variables, they can prioritise goals and support decisions with rich data, while surfacing priority decisions that call for human intelligence which can make or break a campaign.

Making data meaningful with AI

With so much data at their fingertips, marketing teams are no doubt the ones who understand their target audiences best. The challenge, however, is to identify the relevant data and act on it. How one uses the available data is more important than the volume of the data. Often, marketing teams find that they have huge amounts of data on hand, but not the tools required to filter and prioritize the most important data points. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes into play.

The Trade Desk’s powerful AI-guided platformcan optimize decision-making by automatically sorting, analyzing and prioritizing more than a trillion ad opportunities per day. That’s roughly 13 million ad opportunities every second, which is well over 100 times the volume of global search.Based on the goals defined at the outset, the platform knows what the important decisions are, and offers relevant insights to the user. The marketer remains in control of the process and can clearly see the decisions that the platform makes.

Threading the needle between privacy and relevance

In today’s age of advertising, delivering great consumer experiences comes down mainly to two things – deliveringrelevant, timely ads, and being conscious of data privacy.

Around 70 percent of Indian users in a recent survey said they were aware that advertising is essential for enabling free access to apps and websites and more thanhalf said they were willing to watch relevant ads in exchange for free content.

The operative word in both cases is “relevant.” The ads that consumers are shown should match their interests. Ads about pension schemes are unlikely to be of interest to a young stay-at-home dad, while ads about cookery classes are of no use to a professional chef. Even when the right ads are served to those with relevant interests, they must be timed appropriately, spaced across the right channels, and delivered at the optimal frequency.

Furthermore, marketers should take care to ensure that the tools and technologies they use to serve ads are offering them a transparent view of the goings-on behind the scenes and prioritizin gand protecting the privacy of their customers. Industry initiatives like Unified ID 2.0 serve both these needs –enabling marketers to target consumers better and maximize ROI, while putting consumers firmly in the driver’s seat by giving them the power to control how and how much of their data is shared with marketers.

We stand today at an interesting point in time. The growing momentum for data-based advertising across the world and the emergence of new advertising models on the open internet present us with an opportunity to transform the digital advertising industry and create a system in which marketers, content creators and consumers are winners.