5 days before the sun reached a specific amount of daylight making flowers and trees release their pollen local ads with antihistamine for allergic people started to appear on multi-platform devices increasing sales like a sun-tsunami across the US.

From pages to people, the power of programmatic marketing

Another example: A nation wide car repair shop incorporated real-time weather in the campaign and made the copy spot on relevant for the audience. If you had any type of car or driving app installed in your phone targeted ads would appear. For example during rain the copy adressed problem with bad windshield wipers.

Using the sun and the weather in different campaigns programmatic marketing reaches new heights of relevances which converts more. The relevance is the key in advertising no matter what kind of advertising made. Even though a lot is getting automated the human creativity is talking a larger part according Lèon Leist from Cadreon holding the talk.

Programmatic marketing is a technology based on controlled algoritms that gives a automated advantage to specifically serve an ad to a specific customer at the brink of purchase or close to it. The relevancy and message of the content is paramount for succeeding.

What is programmatic marketing

Programmatic buying is powerful to advertisers because it automates all of the processes that used to give them headaches. With RTB (not necessary included included in PMP), a buyer can set parameters such as bid price and network reach. A programmatic buy will layer these parameters with behavioural or audience data all within the same platform. Simply explained this means marketing pros can define the budget, goals, and attribution model while the platform rapidly adjusts dozens of variables in real time based on performance to determine the right campaign settings to achieve the desired ROI. Algorithms that filter impressions based on behavioural data allow online advertisers to spend more time being creative and less time reading spreadsheets.

Talking with Lèon Leist over a beer (me having water) he clearly stated the efficacy of programmatic marketing but also pointing out it´s not always a straight way to success or for everyone. Lèon and his colleagues have access to over 900 websites that are on Cadreons white list, meaning they have confirmed quality traffic which in round numbers means millions of visitors (exactly how many I don´t know).

I can imagine the conversion rate going up when ads and copy adjusts instantaneously to every visitors preferences within the selected target groups. I politely asked about the average conversion rate on a campaign and got a straight forward answer that it´s ranging in between 0,5-3,0% from ad click to purchase. I honestly thought it was higher.

Is programmatic “the future of ad buying”?

Probably, yes. It’s impossible to tell what portion of advertising is now traded programatically, but the advantages is making it to grow quickly. Some agencies now say they’re eager to buy as much media as possible through programmatic channels, and some major brands have even built out in-house teams to handle their programmatic ad buying as they spend more of their marketing budgets that way. At the moment, it’s mainly online ads that are traded programatically, but increasingly media companies and agencies are exploring ways to sell “traditional” media this way, including TV spots and out-of-home ads.

Knock, knock – who´s there? The future of ad buying is behind the door, are you gonna open? Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments!