Advertising is creativity given validation. People buy from a brand because a copy and its message resonates with them, and if it’s in their budget. Ogilvy, the advertising man, was touted as a paragon of creativity and scientific rigor for his breakthrough in advertising and helping products reach the masses.
Mad Men. Nike. Apple —advertising is an intense study. And everyone wants a piece of it. Brands can build identities with ads and stay in the buyer’s head for decades or years. Becoming part of their nostalgia.
‘Advertising is powerful’ is an understatement. But now, the landscape of ads has changed. All it takes is one look at Times Square and the internet to realize that the most popular form of advertising is digital.
Although print has value and offers a throwback to simpler days, digital advertising has made it easier to reach relevant audiences and resonate with them.
The most challenging part of creating a copy is making it stand out and understanding the message for the right audience. Design, message, and content are the lynchpin of modern advertising.
But how do you reach your audience at the right time with the right message? The answer: Programmatic advertising. The logic behind programmatic ads is simple— as AI Sweigart says, automate the boring stuff.
Programmatic ads have revolutionized advertising. And we’re not even over-indexing its value. But to unravel the full breadth of ad potential, marketing teams must devise strategies for impact.
And these programmatic advertising strategies go way deeper than the obvious.
Programmatic Ads are flexible.
Programmatic ads are complex systems devised by publishers and advertisers to simplify the process of advertising. These systems involve a lot of moving parts. Before we touch on the strategies. Let us, for the layman, explain what programmatic ads are.
Programmatic Ads: An Introduction
In simple terms, programmatic ads are the automation of the ad system. There are four technical concepts that marketing teams should know. These are the: –
- DSP or Demand Side Platform
- SSPs or the Supply Side Platform
- RTB or Real-time bidding
- Ad Inventory or Total ad space
The process starts with the demand side platform. Advertisers use these systems to automate their ads and set up campaigns. On the DSP, the advertiser sets their budget, bidding limit, and so on. In real-time, the RTB starts bidding, and when an advertiser wins, the SSP gives the ad inventory to the winning copy.
These ad inventories are spaces on a website or a slot in video or audio content.
All of this is automated. The advertiser has to choose their audience and define them for the DSP and SSP. The algorithms do the rest.
Programmatic: The Importance
It is an effective way of advertising. And it keeps on growing as the tech permeates into the tiniest details of our lives. The moment we wake up, advertising and its potential can reach us through our smart devices and OOH displays.
It is this potential that advertisers must use to elevate the consumer’s life. And that is where the programmatic advertising strategies start.
Programmatic Bidding: The Types
Programmatic advertising has tiers of its own. There are various types of bidding that advertisers can engage in based on their budget and standing in the market. Yes, some advertisers enjoy the benefits of an exclusive guestlist.
These types are as follows: –
Open Exchange
Many publishers can bid on the open exchange type of programmatic bidding. It is open to all entries. And there are a lot of publishers available to the advertisers. Open exchange uses RTB to bid for the spaces. These ads do not have a guarantee.
Private Auction
This is where things get exclusive. Not all advertisers are allowed in the private auction. Certain publishers allow a select few to use the ad inventory. Private auction works on the bidding system of PMP or private marketplace— it is the exclusive version of RTB.
Programmatic Guaranteed
This is where we realize the importance of a buyer/seller relationship. Programmatic guaranteed happen between two parties. There is only one advertiser and one publisher. The advertiser has exclusive rights to run ad campaigns on this publisher’s website. Imagine the potential it has. A deal with high-quality publishers means higher chances for ad personalization. After all, an exclusive publisher means access to exclusive audiences and premium inventory. They work on the programmatic direct technology.
There are no bids in programmatic guaranteed. The prices of clicks, impressions, etc. are fixed. And the number of impressions is fixed, too. Negotiated by the buyer and publisher, the publisher promises a certain amount of impressions.
A note on programmatic direct: It is a one-to-one interaction where advertisers’ salespeople meet with the publisher’s team for the deal.
Preferred Deal
Preferred deals are non-guaranteed types of programmatic bidding. The advertiser gets preferential treatment from the publishers, and the buyer can choose not to publish the ad. The publisher and advertisers set a negotiated price for specific ad inventories. Preferred deals are flexible and offer publishers and advertisers a middle ground for exclusive treatment.
Preferred deals also use programmatic direct for inventory purchase and negotiation.
Strategies often fail, and that is not a bad thing.
Programmatic ads are often said to be complex. And for good reason. There is a lot of thought behind them, and marketing teams must understand their workings.
There is a certain vagueness in the programmatic landscape. Most conversations surrounding the technology and its strategies are based on the basic rules.
Of course, A/B testing and understanding the customer are crucial for an ad campaign’s success. There isn’t a marketing leader out there who doesn’t understand the value of experimentation and its relationship with growth. Or understanding the customer in crafting a resonating message.
Crafting a strategy must go beyond all of the basics and the obvious. It would be easy to list down all the things that you must do to succeed. From A/B testing to understanding the DSPs, technical knowledge is a must, but it is a topic discussed at length.
However, one crucial aspect of programmatic advertising strategies, in fact, marketing in general, is how you find a strategy unique to your organization and then execute it.
In advertising, it is by understanding that you must be as fluid as the customer itself.
Emerging Trends
Ask your social media managers. They will tell you that trends change almost daily. Think of all the trends you followed. How many of them died within the day, and how many still persist?
Why does it happen? Psychologists and marketing experts have pondered over this question for a long time. A works, but D does not.
The answer lies in the cultural context of the message. B2B marketing is often said to be boring.
Emerging trends are linked to what is relevant to the culture you are advertising to. And this aspect goes beyond understanding your customer; it is context-based.
Culture, in this day and age, means understanding the societal and technological landscape of the target geography and demographic.
The simplest example is: Will you talk to a 20-year-old like you would with a 60-year-old? No, their technology and understanding of the world changes. Language and lingo changes.
With this information, marketing teams can not only identify emerging trends but also create them. One of the most famous examples is Oatly. Their disruptive marketing is based on eye-catching and energetic messages that go against the grain.
They recently went to the US capitol and gave people ice cream, which was advertised as tastier than regular ice cream. But such disruptive marketing is possible in the ever-social US climate. If it were Japan, they would have been subtle and contradictorily a bit more absurd.
Emerging trends and timeless messages are the crux of marketing strategies. And to understand them, you must understand your customer segments’ culture above everything else.
The Budget Strategy For Programmatic Campaign
Bidding is one of the most crucial aspects of programmatic advertising strategies. In Hubspot’s 2024 state of marketing report, marketers report facing scrutiny in how their budgets are spent and how ROI is generated.
And that scrutiny has only increased. Programmatic ads are budget-heavy. DSPs cost a lot. While running the ad itself will based on the ad budget, impressions, the bid at which it closed, and the keywords used, the tools that you buy will be out of the larger marketing budget. And they are expensive.
How will you justify your budget? This strategic question is often overlooked. In this piece by Google Think—Jim Lecinski, a professor of clinical marketing from Northwestern Univerity, suggests presenting marketing budgets not as a bill but as a financial investment.
It is a simple yet revolutionary idea. For your programmatic advertising strategies to work, you must justify the cost behind them and propose levers of financial growth.
You must: –
- First, understand why programmatic ads are necessary for your brand. And the potential ROAS the campaigns will present to you.
- Propose an exact budget and the returns you expect from the campaigns.
- What market share do you expect your ad campaigns will deliver, and what will be the financial effect on the quarter?
- What are the drivers of growth you are targeting? Is it brand awareness? Is it leads? Or is it sales?
- What will be the end financial result of the campaign, and how will it affect the bottom line of your organization?
These are some of the questions that will help a CFO make sense of your spending. Advertising, as much a creative endeavor, is also a financial one.
The Creative Strategy
How does one strategize creativity when creativity itself is part of strategy?
The answer: Creativity is nurtured through experimentation.
While marketing teams love to assign data and attributes to their assets and winning templates, there is no such substitute for creativity. What resonates with people are emotions and outcomes. In the B2C industry, this is perceived to be easier than B2B.
But that is not true. When in a workspace, people are still bound to emotions related to their work, and simplifying complex tasks opens up space for more business improvements and a perception of elevated work lives.
As such, creativity must work within the bounds of emotions and provide a positive outcome to your buyers.
The message
Let us try out an example: –
Of the two messages below, what catches your attention the most?
a. Notion is an all-in-one workspace for managing and creating content.
or
b. Bring your ideas to life— ideation, planning, design, and creation. Notion, a canvas built to evolve with your vision.
Both messages will resonate with the right audience. There is a chance one will elicit more emotion, curiosity, and imagination. But that is for you to understand which one.
Creativity can be enabled in your teams by letting them experiment. A/B testing is part of this experimentation to verify what is working. But it is not the only way to experiment.
Hotjar’s product experimentation method.
Hotjar, the solution for website analytics, goes through a framework for product experimentation. It is the scientific method of: –
- Asking the right questions: What does the user want and would benefit from?
- The possible solutions to the problem
- Who does the solution exist for?
- And the data backing up your claims.
This framework empowers marketing teams to come up with their experimentation methods by mixing and matching their unique user base to their behavior.
After all, a message about the product can also be seen as the product itself.
Ad copies are fascinating pieces of art that serve a practical purpose. And should be looked at from a creative aspect. But like architecture—whose art also serves a real function— ads’ creativity has to be deeply rooted in the needs of the buyer.
These needs can be found through understanding the buyer with data.
The Technical Strategy for perfect optimization
We have looked at things from the creatives’ perspective. It is time to get technical.
Technical programmatic ads strategies fall into four parts, and their function is to get a deep understanding of buyers’ needs. The technical strategy enables marketers to validate their creative messages. These four parts are: –
- Understanding Insertion order and line items
- Gathering data
- Analysis
- Integration
Insertion order and line items
One of the main aspects of running an ad campaign is the timing.
When do you want the ads to run?
For how long?
Where?
To whom?
And why?
Without these, you will not be able to have a successful campaign. Purpose, geography, time, and the user are necessary dimensions of a programmatic advertising strategies’ success.
You have to be very careful with these. Because automation will do as you say.
But how do you go about this? It is by defining the insertion order (A term used by Google’s DV360). Insertion order and its equivalent is nothing but the set of interrelated line items (a.k.a. ad groups.) and the commands given to those line items.
Say you are a SaaS company for salespeople. And you are launching your AI agent. The insertion order will have all your ad groups for the launch of the AI agent.
These ad groups will be of similar themes. But they can target: –
- Different user bases with their language
- Different geographies
- Different keywords e.g., Sales AI Agent V.s. Conversational AI Agent.
- Different messages and designs.
- Have certain time periods and differing budgets – maybe one line item runs for an hour, and its budget, 500$ or it runs for the European region and should stop after there are 1k clicks on the ad.
With insertion order and line items, you can set up the rules you want for your campaign. There is complete flexibility as to how you want your ads presented to your users.
Data
Data is a treasure in marketers’ hands. Understanding buyer behavior comes from data. And programmatic advertising is ripe with data.
Every interaction, click, impression, etc. leaves a digital footprint of users’ behavior. And with DSPs, you can choose the data you need in specific scenarios for unique conditions. That makes DSPs a goldmine for first-party data— the holy grail of user data and a key components of programmatic advertising strategies.
However, data without analysis is like a book without a cohesive story.
Analysis
Data analysis has revolutionized human life. From winning wars to boardroom meetings, analysis has driven our decision-making ever since we understood the power of computational data.
There are multiple ways of analysis— through automated software or manual effort, data begins to make sense to the one looking for clues. It is the story behind these vast behavioral maps.
Why does one user behave this way with this campaign but not the other?
Analysis lies in questions such as these. Adobe has a great blog on data analysis and its tools. But for our programmatic advertising strategies, analysis must answer the following questions: –
- Is the campaign working as good as you hoped it would?
- Do the numbers or trends suggest that your ad spend was justified?
- Does the trajectory of your ad campaign need to change? If yes, in which section do you think it should be?
The analysis gives insights into scattered data. But it is the human being who must choose what to do with it. An AI will provide a predictive analysis of your data and visualize it.
The main question is: What can you do about it?
Here’s a resource for all marketing analytical enthusiasts. To generate insights in BigQuery, you would need to do this: https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/data-insights
But your DSP will also provide such analysis. At least, DV360 promises to do so.
Integration
Integration is a vital concept in marketing. It means delivering a cohesive and singular experience to your user.
Programmatic ads are part of customers’ journey into a seamless experience. One cutting-edge advantage of programmatic advertising is the data-driven approach it takes.
And thus enables a dynamic approach to marketing. Based on your buyer and their journey in the funnel, programmatic ads can change the message. And the mode it takes to reach the buyer.
These dynamic ads have the advantage of reaching your buyers wherever they prefer to be. Even if it is their smart TV.
The Reach strategy
Programmatic ads can reach the buyer anywhere. From TVs and phones to their Alexas, these ads can potentially approach your ICP on their terms.
Reaching your audience is not complicated. If your ICP loves podcasts, that’s where you will be.
But what matters is the message. The cohesive experience must also be dynamic enough to adapt to the channel. The message should stay the same, but the delivery will change.
If your ICP is an avid football fan, can you leverage that to reach them through their CTVs?
And you should not do this for clicks either. Remember the rule? 95% of your ICP is not in the market to buy.
But you should nonetheless market to them. Why do you think that is?
It’s because of category entry points. In any given scenario, if a buyer wants to buy something, they will search their memory banks for an option before any search engine. In short, if they think of you in an ideal buying situation, there is a high chance that you will be their choice.
There is a reason why positive brand awareness and market share are so intimately linked.
Bringing it all together – The end of strategy
This is not a comprehensive take on the programmatic advertising strategies that you must take to improve. There’s the omnichannel experience, cross-device targeting, second-party and third-party data leveraging, and more.
There is a good chance your strategy may fail. And that is a good thing. Programmatic advertising strategies’ success is based on the agile practices of failing, pivoting, and success. We have presented to you moving parts that will be necessary for you to understand its depth.
The way you use these moving parts will be based on your creativity. As you experiment and grow, so will your strategy.
As a leader, you must drive the balance between creativity, experimentation, budget, and execution.
Programmatic advertising strategies are intense and satisfying.
Programmatic ads are deeply rooted in marketing strategies. Ad copies must be creative and deliver value to the user. Whether it’s humor, design, content, or the message, each copy must be treated like a product and elicit emotion in the viewer.
There are many dimensions by which you can judge your ads’ success, but if it does not align with business objectives, there is a chance that you may not get the organizational buy-in necessary for the campaigns.
CMOs must teether the line between advertising’s creative side and its financial one. One of the greatest advantages of programmatic ads is its data banks, which can produce high-quality data that will be beneficial for the entire organization.
The complexities of programmatic advertising strategies are not lost on us. That is why Ciente.io orchestrates your buyer experience for you. We lighten the load on your shoulders by bringing our expert-led strategies for brand success.