ONE TOUGH QUESTION: PROGRAMMATIC 2016

Target Key Audiences

Across Devices in Real Time

Leveraging data-rich programmatic marketing optimizes campaigns to help marketers reach and convert customers

Programmatic ad buying — once considered

to be all about efficiency — has moved

mainstream and is increasingly enabling

marketers to be more targeted at scale. Plus,

programmatic is quickly evolving beyond

banners to video, rich media, and even TV.

Programmatically purchased ads are on a

growth spurt, climbing from half of all dollars

spent on digital ads in 2015 to two-thirds

this year, and are projected to hit nearly

three-quarters next year, according to research

from eMarketer. In dollars, that translates from

$15.8 billion spent on programmatic in 2015 to

$27.5 billion in 2017, a 74% increase.

What’s the first step marketers considering

programmatic should take to not only get

started, but also get the most from the

approach? For marketers already dabbling in

programmatic, what’s one improvement they

can make or step they can take to successfully

advance their efforts? Eleven marketing

thought leaders offer their insights on how

to leverage programmatic to reach — and

motivate — new and existing customers.

–Joann Whitcher

TABLE OF CONTENTS

4 Lindsay Fordham, director, product marketing, Rocket Fuel 10 Andrew Fischer, cofounder and CEO,

Choozle

9 Chad Peplinski, SVP, media acquisitions and operations, Conversant

5 Andrew Eifler, VP, product management, AppNexus 6Joanna O’Connell, CMO, MediaMath

11 James Smith, EVP, Americas, Criteo12 David Staas, president, NinthDecimal

14 Michael Bird, GM and global leader of sales and marketing solutions, Dun & Bradstreet

15 Bill Nagel cofounder and chief marketing strategist, Netsertive

7 Ryan Phelan, VP, marketing insights, Adestra 8 Edward Thomas, head of audience, Skimlinks

LINDSAY FORDHAMDirector, product marketing, Rocket Fuel @lindsaylfordham @rocketfuelinc

According to IDC, programmatic TV (pTV) will account for $17.3 billion in ad spend worldwide by 2019 — up from $69 million in 2014. It’s a large, growing, yet often misunderstood market.

For brand marketers, a first step is to leverage programmat-ic TV to reach underserved audiences as a complement to their traditional marketing program. With the ability to reach audiences with greater precision (or individual households, in the case of Dish), marketers dial up or down week by week to balance overall reach and frequency. The next step is for mar-keters to optimize TV based on what they’ve learned from their digital campaigns. For example, digital can be run first to see who connects with the brand idea, and then followed with a refined TV target based on that. Or TV can be used first to tell the story, and digital can be used later to remind people of the story.

Direct response is not currently a prime use case for pTV, but surprising benefits may accrue for those willing to do their homework. The first step here is to run targeted TV tests with calls to action, and read market response in terms of online and offline behaviors. In other words, test whether TV can generate primary demand.

The absence of a click as a key performance indicator (KPI) is endemic to TV, of course, but market response can be mea-sured. Key aspects of pTV that support this are fine-grained user control of activation and pacing, geo, and creative. Market-ers can quickly saturate a target group, and then look for online response to the TV as lift in website traffic from that target.

As marketers move closer to the ultimate goal of reaching people at the precise moment when they’re receptive to the brand’s message, the person rather than the device should become the focus of planning. For consumers, this increases relevance and resonance of all forms of advertising — a win-win for everyone.

ANDREW EIFLER VP, product management, AppNexus @AEifler @appnexusThe biggest improvement any marketer can make when it comes to programmatic is to make sure they’re using the right type of solution for their needs.

When evaluating digital service providers (DSPs), the first thing you need to think about is whether you’re really looking for more of a media-first solution or more of a tech-first solution.

The choice is not as straightforward as you might think.Are you an agency looking for a new vendor to roll out your media plan? Are you a

marketer who wants a full-service solution? If these questions resonate, you’re probably looking for more of a media-first solution.

Are you a marketer with a data science team? Are you a marketer looking to build a differentiated in-house media buying capability? Or, are you an agency or trade desk with a trading team? If so, you’re probably looking for more of a technology-first solution.

When it comes to media-first solutions, the evaluation is fairly simple:• Which DSP is going to deliver you the best results relative to your KPIs?• Level and quality of service you receive• Insights about what happened and why in your digital ad campaign • Does the DSP also own any media properties that might create a conflict of interest

when selecting media?• What assurances can the DSP give you that they’re working to minimize the “ad tech

tax” — fees taken out of your media budget by ad tech players

If you’re looking for a more technology-first solution you should care about: • Does the DSP own their own servers or is the DSP just built on top of AWS (Amazon

Web Services)? • Inventory access: does the DSP listen to 100% of the traffic from major supply side

platforms (SSPs) and exchanges or do they throttle inventory access?• Is the DSP part of an end-to-end ad tech platform or is it a point solution DSP that

will require working with other ad tech companies if you need other parts of the ad tech stack (such as SSP, publisher ad server)?

• What is the employee breakdown of sales/services versus product/engineering? The best technology companies will be close to 50% product and engineering

• Does the DSP have open APIs for you to build on top of? How comprehensive are those APIs? Does the DSP have API-only customers?

Answering these questions should help guide you in selecting the right partner to excel at programmatic.

JOANNA O’CONNELLCMO, MediaMath @joannaoconnell @MediaMath

First getting started? Seek out knowledge on programmatic. Talk to brands you admire and understand what they’re doing and how they’re thinking about programmatic.

Challenge your own assumptions about what programmatic means. It’s an approach to marketing, not a line item on a media plan. Learn about how the concepts underlying programmatic — the automation of process-es and decision-making driven by data, powered by machines — can help you meet your business needs.

Marketers need to think about programmatic in terms of powering mar-keting of the future — real time, data driven, addressable, and scalable — which is crucial for a brand looking for long-term competitive advantage. Think about the long-term strategy, whether it’s in how you think about organization design for yourself, your colleagues, and your agency, or in how you think about selecting programmatic technology partners (such as don’t get distracted by bells and whistles of some particular technology). One of your jobs as a marketer is to choose partners that can help take you on a longer-term journey. Look for partners who can educate, advise, grow with you, and who think big picture and future-state.

If you’re dabbling in programmatic, consider why you’re dabbling rather than embracing. There are lots of potential options to grow the effectiveness and efficiency of your programmatic approach. Consider questions like:

• Do you have the right rules in place — such as frequency management and cross-channel message sequencing — that improve both the user experience and business outcomes?

• How well do you understand the environment or environments where your ads are running? Are you making the most of these environments, for example, by building privilege — whether business or structural — into relationships with publishers?

• Are you considering connecting what happens in your owned channels managed by technologies such as campaign management systems to your paid channels such as video advertising to create a more cohesive programmatic marketing strategy?

Dabbling is a start, but if your goal is to get to addressable, real-time marketing at scale, it’s necessary to think bigger and longer term.

RYAN PHELAN VP, marketing insights, Adestra @ryanpphelan @Adestra

Don’t rely on what only you know.Many marketers use only internal data to identify their

best customers. It’s a good place to start, because it shows how your customers behave on your websites and interact with your products. But that could be for minutes a day, week, or month.

You have to invest in external data from third parties to find out what your customers are doing the rest of the day.

The key to accurate programmatic ad buying is knowing where to advertise and what message to use. You have to be able to identify your customers and what motivates them.

Suppose you choose Facebook to advertise to a specif-ic customer group. But, do you know whether Facebook is the most effective channel to reach that group? If you don’t know for sure, you’re wasting money. Stupid data makes stu-pid advertising.

I once worked with a company that used a great set of inter-nal personas. But, an external analysis blew up those personas because they reflected only the time customers spent on its websites. With strictly internal data, the company only had a 1-degree view of the customer instead of a 360-degree view.

The use of external data can help you discover channel pro-pensity, demographics, location, motivations, and other factors that could alter the personas you build with just internal data.

If you’re a beginner, analyze the data you have. Figure out what you don’t know. Then, research what big data strategies and third-party data can give you so you can build better cus-tomer models.

Finally, look at your email marketing program to identify cus-tomers. Email addresses are the key to the addressable con-sumer. Email has become PII, and that identification is essential across programmatic ad buying. If you aren’t looking at your email marketing program, you’re missing a big opportunity.

EDWARD THOMASHead of audience, Skimlinks @thomed @Skimlinks

To get the most from a programmat-ic approach, think about who your customer is today, and who you want your customers to be tomorrow. Pro-grammatic makes it all too easy to tar-get your existing customers, while not growing your customer base. Use audi-ence targeting technologies to zero in on the people you can influence. Avoid preaching to the choir of existing cus-tomers and use advertising to reach — and motivate — new customers. The joy of programmatic is the ability to cherry-pick the people you value the most; so use it, and be prepared to bid high for audiences and traits that are most valuable to your campaign.

To successfully advance your efforts using programmatic, look at what types of people respond to your creative; dif-ferent messaging and different calls to action will trigger responses in differ-ent people. Very soon you’ll find that picking and choosing the best users for your best-performing creative will yield disproportionate results. Know-ing that a customer is in the final stag-es of making a purchase might mean you should display your price-promo-tion creative. A different person who is in the early stages of awareness might respond better to a message about your product features.

CHAD PEPLINSKI SVP, media acquisitions and operations, Conversant @conversant

It all starts with people. Marketers need to clearly identify their target audience and articulate the type of response they’re look-ing to generate.

Whether you’re trying to build relationships with new customers, communicate with existing customers, or re-engage former custom-ers, you need to think about who those individuals are and how best to reach them. Each has their own unique needs and expectations, so marketers must have quality data at the individual level.

As it pertains to programmatic specifically, having great insights and leveraging the right technology to select the precise moment to message consumers is unquestionably important. However, you cannot neglect the importance of scalability and match rates. Broad segments sourced from third parties will not have client-specific data that can be leveraged to initiate the right interaction. And pure con-tent buys can reach a marketer’s target audience, but there will un-doubtedly be waste in ad spend. Digital-savvy marketers considering programmatic for the first time need to create or leverage their own first-party data to execute the best possible buying strategy, maxi-mize scalability, and ensure high match rates. If you can only reach a small population, the program will have limited impact on your mar-keting objectives.

The biggest improvement any marketer already leveraging pro-grammatic can make is to advance his decision-making. To do so requires quality data and a scientific approach. Manually selecting frequency, messaging windows, and sequencing takes time and can miss that ideal moment to deliver your message. Advanced decision-making allows marketers to have ongoing conversations with individuals. Too often, marketers use programmatic to retarget users and inundate them with the same ads over and over again. Delivering the right message at the right place and moment in time, and in a brand-safe environment, will dramatically elevate the return and efficiency of marketers’ ad spend. It will also help to limit fraud and drive viewability.

ANDREW FISCHERCofounder and CEO, Choozle @AndrewFischer_1 @choozle

Programmatic advertising is powered by technology and data- driven platforms, so the initial step for marketers looking to use it is to decide who’s going to run the platform. Until re-cently, the complexity of the ecosystem necessitated deep and specialized programmatic expertise or an outsourced or fully managed solution. As the industry has matured, howev-er, many platforms have evolved to offer simpler programmat-ic software that caters to programmatic beginners even with small budgets.

Thus, similar to search advertising, many marketers opt to run their programmatic marketing in-house through a self-service platform. Depending on factors including internal resources and the size and complexity of the campaigns, marketers may want to enlist a specialized ad agency to operate the platform and run individual campaigns. Many agencies have expertise across multiple platforms and provide value through their experience, strategy, and efficiency in programmatic marketing.

Already involved with programmatic? Stay educated. Be-cause programmatic marketing evolves so quickly, ongoing education and practice are required to get the most out of the medium. Private marketplaces, header bidding, and cross- device targeting are just a few of the many newer tactics in the space. To keep up on the bevy of new products, trends, and challenges, marketers should actively consume industry arti-cles and research, and also attend relevant industry meet-ups and conferences.

Furthermore, many programmatic firms offer education courses and programs that are free and available to all. These education programs are typically self-service, enabling the student to progress through the program at their own speed. Transferring this education into practical testing with live cam-paigns will determine which new products and strategies work best for each marketer.

JAMES SMITHEVP, Americas, Criteo @JamesGSmith @criteo

For marketers considering programmatic buying, I rec-ommend first embracing a pure cost-per-click (CPC) pricing model and establishing KPI up front. CPC pricing drives cost efficiency while still enabling the potential to scale. Ultimately, it helps marketers understand the true ROI of their campaign because they pay for performance rather than sheer volume.

To get the most out of a programmatic buying ap-proach, set clear KPI goals to help you leverage the real- time optimization capabilities and transparency that programmatic offers and ensure a satisfactory level of accountability and control. It’s also important to choose an established, reputable partner who can provide the tools and service you need to meet your programmat-ic goals. Every marketer wants to get the most return for every dollar he spends, so a partner that allows you to benefit from unlimited impression views and view-through transactions without paying for them is abso-lutely the way to go. As you implement your program-matic strategy, test, re-test, and learn, and don’t hesitate to make quick adjustments to better reach your goals.

Marketers dabbling in programmatic can integrate prospecting and retargeting efforts throughout the entire sales funnel, across all devices and channels, to take their efforts to the next level. Layer in some dynamic, personalized creative and tailored content for a true one-to-one marketing solution that speaks to all consumers individually. Doing so can drive up click-through-rate (CTR) by 600%. An exact match cross-device solution can provide the foundation for a truly comprehensive omnichannel marketing strategy, and access to a wealth of consumer data with exten-sive audience segmentation, consumer insights, and behavioral learnings at scale.

DAVID STAAS President, NinthDecimal @NinthDecimal

Programmatic ad buying is about more than automating your marketing program; it provides marketers with an affordable opportunity to target your key audiences across devices in real time. For marketers looking to get started in programmatic, the most effective first step is to transfer existing knowledge to further it via programmatic. Getting started doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Look at the audiences and targets you’re having the most success with, and find a partner you can work with who allows you to run the same audience segment through them and on your programmatic platform of choice. By enabling the exact same segment through two different execution forms (traditional and programmatic), it opens the door to new learnings.

Also, be sure that you’re working with a platform that allows you to target and measure mobile audiences across devices at scale. Mobile has quickly become the first screen for consum-ers, and mobile audience data provides marketers with rich insights into consumers’ physical-world behaviors. Brands are finding that mobile audiences are performing better for online ad campaigns than online audiences due to mobile’s robust audience intelligence.

To get the most out of mobile programmatic, don’t settle for a platform that only offers limited audience segments; in-stead, work with a provider that allows you to leverage your first-party consumer data to match and target the same spe-cific consumer groups that you’re reaching out to on desk-top, TV, direct mail, and other channels. This enables you to market holistically to your consumer while also providing ac-curate ROI metrics.

In the same vein, for marketers already leveraging online programmatic buying, it’s important to fully integrate mobile into your strategy, rather than establishing it as a separate silo.

Not only does this enable true omnichannel campaigns that engage con-sumers across any device, but it also allows you to take advantage of the sophisticated measurement capabilities inherent in mobile marketing.

Mobile is unique in providing physical-world data about where the consumer spends the majority of their time, which means you can mea-sure things like incremental lift in store visits, or see how many of your customers visited your physical location versus a competitor’s location after seeing your ad. These capabilities finally give marketers a full picture of their campaigns’ effectiveness among different target audiences as well as across channels, laying the foundation for a new level of market-ing optimization.

Additionally, marketers who are already dabbling in programmatic can advance their efforts by pushing for scale, and then engaging in a pro-grammatic cross-media strategy. We see a lot of brands dipping their toe in the programmatic pool by making really small buys, or layering lots of segments on top of each other. Both of those strategies make it difficult to glean actionable insights or separate out what works. The power of programmatic is that marketers can be rapidly agile and adapt in test-and-learn situations. Pursuing a series of A/B tests where both A and B have scale is now feasible in programmatic and is favorable to an A/B/C/D approach with smaller scale. An approach with scale and clearly defined segments will create success by working with the inherent advantages of programmatic (real time, no spend/volume commits, and no back and forth for optimizations or IO process), as opposed to within the confines of traditional media buying.

Once your programmatic strategy is testing and refining segments at scale, work with platforms that can extend your specific target segments across all devices and media formats. Understand how the same seg-ment performs on mobile Web, mobile app, desktop, and video.

Brands are continuing to shift larger portions of their marketing bud-get to programmatic, driving programmatic platforms to expand beyond traditional online banner ads to video, mobile, TV, etc. As more types of media become enabled for programmatic buying, proficiency in ex-ecuting these types of cross-media campaigns will build a competitive advantage for marketers.

“MARKETERS WHO ARE ALREADY DABBLING IN PROGRAMMATIC CAN ADVANCE THEIR EFFORTS BYPUSHING FOR SCALE, AND THEN ENGAGING IN A PROGRAMMATIC CROSS-MEDIASTRATEGY”

MICHAEL BIRDGM and global leader of sales and marketing solutions Dun & Bradstreet @DnBUS

To get the most from programmatic, start by defining your audience. Though programmatic may sound intimidating, it’s no different than other targeted marketing campaigns — it all starts with knowing who you want to reach. To home in on your target, you must first determine the answers to the follow-ing questions:

• What companies have the need for your solutions? Do you target by reve-nue or number of employees?

• Are there specific industries you cater to?• What types of individuals or roles have the greatest need for your

solution? Are there specific titles that you need to reach?Next, validate that your target profile accurately represents those who en-

gage and buy from you. To do this, gather first-party data across online and offline campaigns, your CRM system, and marketing automation platforms. Run analysis on deals you closed in the past six months. Then match that data back to your target profile to determine if you have the right attributes and your data is accurate.

Don’t limit yourself by solely relying on first-party data. Sixty-two percent of marketers agree that the number one advantage of buying media programmat-ically is the ability to layer insights and data. Engage a third-party data provider to supplement the data you need and you’ll be on track to get started.

For marketers already dabbling in programmatic, be sure to commit to a regular cadence of evaluating past campaigns and adjusting your approach accordingly. Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots and lost nearly 300 games in his career, yet succeeded because he learned from his mistakes. Don’t get lured in by the convenience of programmatic and fall into the set-it-and-forget-it trap.

Track the performance of your campaigns with your ad operations team, agency, or digital service provider. Examine what you’ve learned from accounts and customers you’ve recently converted and evaluate whether you’re attribut-ing success accurately. Make sure you’re covering the key questions you should be asking, and continually test new programmatic approaches. This includes re-fining the messaging, creative, segmentation, channels, and especially the data sets you’re using.

BILL NAGELCofounder and chief marketing strategist, Netsertive@bonnagel @Netsertive

Programmatic has become a popular tool for many reasons. It’s made media buying more efficient; it’s largely improved trans-parency; and, overall, it provides marketers the opportunity to increase digital marketing performance based on enhanced tar-geting options and rich data. While it is, in many ways, today’s flavor du jour for marketers, it doesn’t mitigate the need for a marketer to spend time building a smart, targeted campaign that’s aligned with KPIs and other goals. In other words, there’s no replacement for tried-and-true marketing expertise.

When looking at some of the challenges that national prod-uct brands face when trying to market locally or through local partners, programmatic is not necessarily the answer. In its cur-rent state, programmatic is a tool that national brand marketers can use because they have the budget and resources to support it. However, that’s not the case for every marketer; particularly those that work at small, local organizations or those with limit-ed marketing budgets. For these marketers, they need to work closely with and leverage their brand affiliates to determine if a programmatic campaign makes sense and will help them meet mutual goals.

For those getting started with this type of automated plat-form, it’s important that they treat programmatic like they would any other tool: Pay attention to objectives and determine how the tool can help achieve marketing goals more successfully.

Programmatic is designed to help marketers make smarter and more efficient decisions. For those already dabbling in pro-grammatic, don’t overlook all the rich marketing data that can be leveraged for real-time optimization. In addition, marketers should look critically at removing the audiences that aren’t per-forming. By doing so, this will help marketers get closer to their ideal target. Ultimately, programmatic is a data-rich tool that can help optimize campaigns and help marketers reach and convert local buyers at the time of purchase.