There’s no doubt that this move, which follows in the footsteps of other browsers, including Apple’s Safari, is greatly challenging for the digital media industry. In fact, we should have been waving goodbye to cookies over the next few months, but the complexity of the project last year led Google to delay the phase-out until late 2023.

The battle for attention

At the same time as this technological challenge, brands are facing a new battle for attention. The growth of digital media has been a double-edged sword for brands, with ever greater numbers of small and medium businesses advertising for the first time. While that’s happening, consumers are enjoying more ways than ever to spend their time. From virtual reality to unlimited streaming services, the media industry continues to offer ever greater choices for consumers to spend their time – both commercial and ad-free.

It seems like a perfect storm. But while the end of cookies marks the death of the old world of digital advertising, marketers shouldn’t panic. Advances in alternative ad technologies – often making use of artificial intelligence – will enable advertisers in the post-cookie age to make their campaigns more effective, without the privacy headache of cookies.

An alternative solution

A number of new approaches to allow programmatic advertising to continue without cookies are in the works. But it is contextual signals, based on anonymous interest cohorts, that are quickly becoming the best data point to maximise metrics like attention. 

Contextual signals don’t make use of personal data, or track users between websites. That means they avoid not just the privacy concerns of cookies, but also the issue of being shown the same ad repeatedly. This is a major aspect of “bombardment”, identified as a key threat to public trust in advertising in a 2019 report by the UK’s Advertising Association.

Instead, contextual signals use non-user-specific metadata from bid requests. As a campaign runs, this data sheds light on which ad buys are most likely to lead to conversions. But to manually analyse this data and make budget allocation adjustments as circumstances change is a Herculean task for anyone. The complexities of digital media buying also result in campaigns that are challenging to scale, due to the need to monitor increased numbers of interdependent items. 

AI in action

This is where AI comes in. With AI, advertisers can build a bespoke learning data set for any given campaign, which then evolves as it learns. As a result, it can make choices that get the best results from a series of variables, therefore delivering the strongest performance. The AI can automatically reallocate budgets in real time, making it much more achievable to scale a campaign. 

This approach means that rather than over-targeting a predetermined set of users (remarketing, for example), a campaign can continually move towards buys that are most effective in capturing the attention of users – leading to greater conversion rates and boosting return on ad spend. 

AI can also make use of other sources of data, such as a brand’s opted-in customer relationship management data or measurement and attribution data, and incorporate custom metrics beyond ROAS (Return On Ad Spend). This gives advertisers greater control of their advertising and allows them to plan campaigns to meet specific business objectives.

A stronger digital media ecosystem

For example, luxury beauty brand Charlotte Tilbury recently utilised an AI designed to be customisable to the digital marketing needs of the brand. They faced problems common in the luxury market, where the relatively small number of (high-spending) consumers means ad campaigns often generate fewer higher value conversions than in other sectors. That then leads to a lack of data that can inform and improve campaign performance and scale. 

Because of this, the AI solution took into account data that is generated in abundance but which legacy approaches to optimisation are unable to utilise: upper funnel signals such as clicks, site visits and ad viewability. The results were significant: a 60% growth in the conversion rate of the brand’s acquisition campaigns, and a 29% drop in average cost per acquisition.

Marketers don’t need to shed a tear for the demise of cookies: the capabilities of AI, when used with contextual signals and first-party data, will let them measure and optimise the performance of their campaigns more effectively than ever before. Along with positive developments in areas such as optimising digital creative, this means a digital media ecosystem that offers better results for advertisers and a better experience for consumers.

The post From Contextual to Attention – How AI is Changing Success Measurement appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The report, titled “Data, People, and Culture: The Evolving Role of the Modern CMO”, surveyed 300 CMOs across the US, UK, and DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) from small to midsize businesses, to better understand how the role of the CMO is changing amid the growing digitalisation of the industry.

However, CMOs are at odds on whether the exponentially increasing sophistication and volume of data helps or hinders creativity, with 41% insisting data does in fact help and 17% remaining undecided.

Importantly, those that say it greatly hinders creativity are twice as likely to struggle with a lack of tools. Furthermore, responses suggest that 30% of marketing teams only review data once a quarter or less, and nearly half (43%) of CMOs feel the greatest barrier to getting value from their marketing data is related to company culture.

At the same time, the need for a dedicated marketing ops role to manage martech stacks has accelerated dramatically. 73% of CMOs are committed to introducing this role to their team: 45% already have someone in place, and a further 28% are currently hiring. Only 12% of CMOs have had one in place for more than a year. 

Harriet Durnford-Smith, CMO, Adverity said: “Modern marketers are faced with huge volumes of data streaming in from multiple sources, so it’s not at all surprising to see CMOs are focused on investing in people dedicated to managing the entire data stack. Without eyes on the big picture, insight-driven decision making becomes nearly impossible.

“A staggering 30% are only reviewing their data sporadically – in today’s data-driven marketplace, brands are in danger of counting themselves out of the race if they don’t have a single unified view of performance, in real time. Now is the time for CMOs to champion change in company culture and embrace the opportunities that data brings.”

The post Does Data Hinder Creativity? Almost Half of CMOs Seem to Think So… appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Understanding how to tailor marketing efforts to suit different types of customers is obviously key, but before you can get started on this, it’s important to understand the differences between segmentation and personalisation.

Although a lot of advertisers and publishers swap out the words personalisation and segmentation for one another, they don’t mean the same thing. The strategies are actually completely different, so here is your simple guide to understand each of them and how they work in relation to one another:

Let’s start with Segmentation

Segmentation, or segmentation targeting, is absolutely key within marketing strategies. It involves grouping consumers into segments based on different characteristics which can be used to determine the most effective way to advertise.

Customers can be grouped according to a multitude of factors – here are a few common examples:

• Geographic segmentation: Grouping customers based on their location in the world, a country or a region, depending on how local the available data is

• Behavioural segmentation: Grouping customers based on their habits, for example how much money they usually spend, how many items they usually purchase at once, or browsing history

• Demographic segmentation: Grouping customers based on personal characteristics, for instance marital status, age, gender identity or occupation

• Device or technology segmentation: Grouping customers based on the device they are using to browse, the internet browser or software they are using

• Psychographic segmentation: Marketers can gather and collate findings about users personality traits, online habits, interests and hobbies and ways of receiving information

It’s usually advised that segmentation is implemented at the beginning of a campaign. This means advertisers can start grouping consumers into these segments from the start, meaning as the campaign progresses, marketing efforts can be more effective as marketers can focus on meeting various needs.

As well as obviously driving more successful campaigns, segmentation can also be a really pleasant way of finding out about your customers and getting to know them on a deeper level to ensure your brand is meeting their needs. For example, if you discover that a large portion of your customers are passionate about sustainability, you can make an effort to put more of a focus on your brand’s sustainability, in turn pleasing your customers and forming positive relationships.

Moving on to Personalisation

Think of personalisation as getting even more personal. This method means identifying a particular customer within a segment. For instance, you could have a customer within the skincare segment who is browsing acne treatments, and from this you can personalise your marketing efforts so this particular customer is presented with acne treatment products.

You want to be able to solve a particular customer’s particular desire. This means you need to understand a customer’s reasons for making the journey they have made to your site or product.

It can be really tricky to find out whether a customer always interacts in the same way, or if they are changing their behaviour every time they visit your site. This is why personalisation is key, as opposed to just using segmentation. It’s difficult at the moment, as we are stuck in a moment of limbo, almost, with the loss of third-party data looming but not having yet arrived, to know what type of data is going to be available for marketers. However, there are various touchpoints that shouldn’t be lost that can help with personalisation:

• Where did the customer travel to your site from?

• Which email messages are they opening, therefore are resonating with them?

• What is their current location?

These factors may change their intent, which gives you a clearer view, when you look at the picture as a whole, of the customers wants and needs.

Can the two be used together?

In order to demonstrate the difference between segmentation and personalisation clearly, here is an example:

• A skincare company is advertising through an advertisement placed on Instagram. Their advertisement shows a group of people using a range of different skincare products displaying different benefits. This, appearing on the feed of a customer who fits into the skincare segment, is segmentation.

• The same skincare company is advertising again on Instagram, however, this time, a user who has been viewing acne treatments online is presented with an image of a model with acne, using acne treating skincare. This is personalisation.

This isn’t to say that segmentation is less effective than personalisation. It can be an easier way for marketers to advertise their products, and also can deliver good results. Personalisation is simply a more specific and targeted approach.

However, the personalisation approach can mean, sometimes, that users become apprehensive about sharing their data. In this article by Yusuf Muhammad, he gave tips on finding the sweet spot of personalisation, instead of ‘creeping’ your customers out.

Segmentation and personalisation can, of course, be used together. But it is of utmost importance that marketers are aware of the difference, especially as segmentation should come first. This is because it determines the reasons you are going to market to particular customers in the first place, and makes personalisation much simpler.

The post Don’t Get This Confused – Segmentation vs Personalisation appeared first on PerformanceIN.

This is where the opportunity to optimise publisher yield with an auction framework like Header Bidding comes in. Through its ability to streamline media trading for publishers and provide transparent access to premium inventory for advertisers, the solution has become a mainstay of online programmatic. Indeed, more than half (55%) of publishers have adopted Header Bidding to sell video inventory and 22% leverage it for Connected TV (CTV).

So precisely what is Header Bidding, how does it work and how is the opportunity for yield optimisation being used in other advertising channels such as programmatic digital out of home (DOOH)? 

What is Header Bidding?

Before the emergence of Header Bidding, publishers would typically use a waterfall auction to trade their inventory. In this model, inventory is offered to one ad network at a time and then moved onto the next if the floor price isn’t met until all impressions are (hopefully) sold. Although this process works in practice, publishers risk missing out on revenue because of the lack of competition for ad impressions. 

Header Bidding is an advanced method of programmatic trading that allows publishers to offer their inventory to multiple SSPs using a unified auction framework. As a result, publishers can invite various demand sources to simultaneously bid on available inventory.

What are the key advantages for publishers?

Firstly, Header Bidding delivers an increase in yield optimisation versus the waterfall model. Studies have found that publishers can significantly grow revenue, with one example showcasing that it increased revenue by 70%. It does this by enabling more competitive auctions where inventory is made available to a larger number of ad buyers who must then outbid one another to secure impressions, leading to higher CPMs. 

In comparison, waterfall auctions accept the first bid that meets the publisher’s floor price and don’t offer visibility on ad buyers that are willing to pay more. By unifying the auction across multiple SSPs, Header Bidding provides this visibility, accepts the highest bid, and maximises ad revenue for the publisher.    

Secondly, Header Bidding allows publishers to be selective over which demand partners they include in their auctions. This gives them more control of their operations, enabling them to manage their resources more efficiently in the bidding process, and ensuring they serve quality promotions to their users. With an improved user experience comes better retention and loyalty, further heightening the value of inventory.

Finally, Header Bidding solutions are easy to manage. There are a number of experienced players in the market that can handle all elements of advertising operations, so publishers do not need to invest the time and resources in building, running, and updating their solutions in house. 

What does Header Bidding bring to advertisers?

With Header bidding, each advertiser has an equal opportunity to secure inventory if their bid wins. This method of programmatic trading gives ad buyers more transparency and greater access to premium ad placements, which can boost the reach and impact of their ad campaigns. 

How is Header Bidding changing programmatic trading across the advertising landscape?

Programmatic trading allows advertisers to boost efficiency, increase precision, and optimise their bidding strategies. In the programmatic DOOH landscape, for instance, this type of trading makes inventory more accessible because they are changed more frequently. Ad buyers can purchase space for an hour and ensure they reach target audiences at the optimal time. 

Solutions for programmatic DOOH inform bidding strategies using location data and patterns in audience behaviours. With this, advertisers can pinpoint the inventory that is best placed to capture the attention of their target audiences. Automated trading solutions based on this type of yield optimisation improve this system by giving advertisers access to a broader selection of premium inventory.

For media owners, a yield optimisation solution enables the integration and management of any number of SSPs without the need for additional development work. As a result, publishers can see an overview of programmatic DOOH activity on a single dashboard, streamlining advertising operations. Moreover, working with one unified auction enables publishers to optimise yield with competitive pricing while minimising reporting discrepancies. 

With programmatic yield optimisation use cases spanning across advertising channels, from digital video to programmatic DOOH, many publishers have begun to embrace it for the promises of increased revenue. Combined with the growing awareness and adoption of programmatic trading, it’s only a matter of time before this solution becomes widely understood and recognised across all sides of the ecosystem.

The post WTF is Header Bidding? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Programmatic was created to simplify advertising and turn it from a costly and time-consuming procedure into a transparent and automated experience. It’s time to find out whether programmatic can be useful for SMEs and what strategies should apply to effectively distribute costs and set campaigns for success.

Addressing unique needs and struggles of SMEs

SMEs are the drivers of world economies as they comprise at least 90% of all businesses globally – small businesses keep the emerging markets afloat. This sector is the most susceptible to changing consumer behavior and tastes, and that’s why small companies are always the first to innovate and deliver ground-breaking products and services to the market.

SMEs are very adaptable and flexible compared to big companies, which are not prone to quick changes and transformations. However, SMEs have their own struggles that mostly revolve around limited budgets and the inability to amplify their brand voice amidst tough competition.

Since small and medium enterprises work in ever-changing realities, and with quickly changing objectives, they also require an agile approach to branding and performance marketing strategies. Simply, entrepreneurs need to be able to make changes to their ad campaigns as soon as they arise – communication with vendors and agencies, meanwhile, can significantly slow this process.

The automation, measurability and simplicity of programmatic promises to democratise advertising for SMEs and solve major problems companies may encounter. The stats, below, prove that – today – programmatic is the most popular route for media-buying, and there are a couple of solid reasons for that.

Five reasons why SMEs benefit from programmatic

According to the stats delivered by Statista, programmatic ad spending reached $129.1 billion U.S. in 2020; in 2021, it is expected to hit $155 billion. Today, programmatic ad spending makes up almost 70% of total display spending altogether in some countries, like the UK, it accounts for 93.6%.

The programmatic advertising ecosystem includes several advertising platforms, each of which takes part in the ad serving process. This ecosystem may seem complex; however, its ultimate aim is to simplify the advertising process, making it easy to handle – even for non-professionals.

Using a convenient dashboard of the programmatic buying platform (typically demand-side platform), SME marketers can adjust necessary conditions for the campaign (targeting, budget distribution, channel, etc.). The platform automatically selects the appropriate placement for the ad and bids for the impression (if it corresponds to the chosen campaign criteria). This way, programmatic helps SMEs to serve ads only to the right audiences at the right times and channels. The benefits that programmatic delivers help to address the majority of struggles small companies typically face:

●  Saving ad budget. With targeting (geo, age, OS, language, etc.), ads are only shown to the appropriate audience, which increases the chances of conversions. It prevents brands from spending money on impressions to people who will unlikely find the offer relevant to their needs. Additionally, demand-side platforms are self-served, which means that no additional cost for campaign management is charged.

●  Reaching the right audiences. Competing for user attention is much easier when the offer is relevant. With programmatic, small companies can target audiences worldwide or show ads only to people who stay near their physical stores (applying geo-targeting).

●  Changing campaign course quickly. In the dashboard, programmatic campaigns can be continually monitored, changed and adjusted at any given moment. Real-time campaign analytics will help small companies understand if their campaigns perform well; if not, it is easy to make timely optimisation.

●  Saving time. Programmatic advertising minimizes human interaction and thus the time required to arrange ad placement. The system automatically bids on the right impression and places the ad at the suitable digital inventory.

●  Connecting to global publishers. For SMEs that sell their goods and services internationally, programmatic is very beneficial, as it ensures global reach across multiple ad networks and myriads of programmatically connected publishers.

How can SMEs start with programmatic?

The fact that programmatic doesn’t require companies to invest large budgets in purchasing bulk inventory is what makes it very convenient, especially for SMEs with limited budgets. Basically, all that company needs to do is register an account at the demand-side platform, fill in the budget and configure campaign settings. The minimal campaign deposit is also flexible so that advertisers could deposit sufficient sums according to their objectives.

Starting off with programmatic is a fairly easy task; however, there are several tactics that we advise following to achieve better performance. The following ones will be especially relevant to SMEs:

Five principles of programmatic advertising for SMEs

Choose the right type of deal – RTB/PMP. We suggest companies learn about real-time bidding and alternative programmatic deals to choose the one that suits their purposes best. At private marketplace deals, for example, publishers sell exclusive inventory unavailable at RTB auctions. At the same time, RTB offers more affordable inventory pricing and easy auction joining for advertisers. Oftentimes, one DSP offers access to all kinds of deals, so it’s important to choose a suitable one.

Choose the pricing model. CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) and CPC (cost per click) are the most popular pricing models in programmatic advertising, and it’s important to consider all pros and cons of each before making a final choice. CPC is very convenient since you pay for the results – clicks on your ads.

At the same time, the CPM model is more affordable and used more often for branding campaigns. For a brief comparison: (e.g.) 50 clicks cost $10 (CPC) and 1000 impressions cost $10 (CPM). It means that you get strictly 50 ad clicks for $10 (CPC).

Still, theoretically, you can get up to 1000 ad clicks for this same price with CPM. For this reason, don’t neglect ad creatives – the more engaging it (and the offer) is, the more clicks it will generate with CPM pricing.

Use your data. Self-serve DSPs already have in place effective targeting mechanisms and access to user data. However, there is third-party data available to all participants in the ecosystem. If you can bring first-party CRM data to the table, it opens a gateway to more sophisticated granular and precise targeting. SMEs that use their own data and connect them to programmatic platforms gain an ultimate competitive advantage when it comes to targeting.

Configure the budget. No one wants to spend their ad budget in one day, so setting a limit can be very important, especially for SMEs. On DSP, you can typically set a daily limit and total limit (counted in impressions or dollars). This way, for example, you can instruct the system to stop bidding when daily spending hits $100 or stop bidding entirely after total spending hits the $4,000 mark. In the same way, you should also use frequency capping to limit the number of impressions (shown to one user per day). This will prevent ad irritation along with overspending.

Apply retargeting. If your company has a small budget, a good tactic would be retargeting your audiences. When you notice that conversions increase, it’s also a good practice to use “combination campaigns” – addressing existing audiences with retargeting and reaching new ones with branding campaigns. This way, you will draw in new audiences while also retargeting those who didn’t convert in the first place.

Additionally, attracting the attention of local residents is, as a rule, very important for small businesses. Coffee shops, beauty salons, flower stores – all of these need promotion but cannot afford outdoor advertising, especially during a lockdown, when it is no longer effective. In this case, SME advertisers can launch geomarketing campaigns and configure geotargeting on programmatic platforms to show ads only to the users who stay or live nearby their physical stores.

Wrapping it up

The role of SMEs in economics can’t be underestimated but, most often, the marketing budgets of these companies are trapped in the gap of insufficient funding. Apart from that, small companies need a more flexible approach to advertising and need to directly manage their ad campaigns and align them with ever-changing business objectives. Programmatic platforms don’t require companies to have strict budget sizes. They automate the ad serving, making it more affordable and helping SME advertisers to directly impact and magnify the outcomes of their campaigns.

The post Five Ways for SMEs to Make the Most of Programmatic Campaigns appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The results revealed that 61% of UK respondents are very or somewhat willing for advertisers to use their data to personalise ads and offers if it keeps content free and data anonymous.

77% said they are very, or somewhat, annoyed when seeing or hearing exactly the same ad many times over.

Intriguingly, over half (56%) prefer, or somewhat prefer, personalised ads that are relevant to their current context over standard, generic ads. 55% are very, or somewhat, more likely to purchase a product or service after having seen or heard a personalised ad.

Given the results, unsurprisingly,  65% of the marketers surveyed revealed that personalisation is a high or very high priority for their advertising strategy, with half saying they use personalised advertising to drive better engagement.

Similarly, when asked what strong or very strong uplift in brand metrics they had seen by using dynamic, personalised creatives, brand awareness (74%), brand consideration (73%) and purchase intent (73%) came out on top. 

Steve Dunlop, CEO, A Million Ads said: “The advertising marketplace has changed forever, requiring advertisers to build a new respect-based relationship with consumers. Bludgeoning your audience with repetitive messaging is a tactic that should be consigned to the past. 

“Instead, brands should leverage the power of personalisation through dynamic creative that adapts to the real-time context of their target audience to boost relevance, engagement and results. Our survey revealed that a clear majority of consumers want personalised ads and are willing to share the information brands need to make it happen – if the value exchange is right. 

“Today, personalisation at scale is more accessible, more affordable and more achievable than ever before. It’s time for brands to reap the rewards.”

It’s very interesting indeed to hear an opposing point of view to what we have been witnessing of late. Brands will have to do some serious research into exactly how their customers feel about their data being used if they are to create effective advertising campaigns whilst still pertaining to their customers wants and needs.

The post Are Users as Worried About Third-Party Data as We Think? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

It enables buyers to identify the publishers in the auction and base the decision of the inventories they purchase on pre-negotiated terms. Simply put, it is a great way for advertisers to ensure that they’re buying the correct inventories from publishers.

So essentially, Deal ID is something that has become important for both publishers and advertisers who are selling and buying media programmatically. 

How does Deal ID work?

In a private auction, a limited number of premium ad inventories are made available by publishers for selected advertisers. The publisher negotiates terms by sending a proposal to the buyer, and both must be satisfied.

When this is finalised, the publisher’s server creates a Deal ID. This ID is passed along with the bid request, which helps demand-side platforms to recognise the bid and deal.

When the auction begins, the publisher sends a bid request with the same Deal ID to the demand partners. As soon as this is received by the buyers’ side it is matched with the ID provided to them and then they can participate in the auction.

A preferred deal is a one-to-one selling and buying advertising model in which the publisher sells a fixed amount of ad inventories at a fixed CMP rate to one advertiser. As in a private auction, the publisher sends a Deal ID to the advertiser via the first-party platform, for instance the ad server. When the buyer’s side receives the bid request with Deal ID, they return the bid response with the same ID.

What are the benefits of Deal ID?

• Deal ID is a good way for matching buyers and sellers according to pre-negotiated criteria. An example of the terms in the criteria could be the minimum amount a buyer can bid, section of the site and many more.

• Deal ID can be used by publishers to differentiate deals to a buyer’s objectives.

• Using Deal ID also offers greater control and flexibility over premium ad inventories to both publishers and advertisers.

• Not all advertisers are allowed to buy inventories, and only buyers with the Deal ID can ultimately bid and win the impressions, meaning there is better ad campaign quality.

• It allows increased transparency since the publisher and advertisers are already aware of who will be buying their inventories and who will be targeted by an ad.

We’d love to hear from you for our WTF series. Don’t forget to submit your article ideas and get in touch if you would like to share your expertise on a particular subject within performance marketing.

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For many, marketing seemed to be an area of business that could be immediately reduced, or slashed altogether, when the pandemic hit, particularly those businesses working with external agencies. According to the IPA Bellwether report, the net balance of companies cutting their marketing budget fell to -50.7% in the second quarter in 2020, down from -6.1%. That’s despite the resulting lower cost to gaining market share with sensible investment in advertising – amidst this greater consumption of digitally promoted products and services. So, what are brands really looking for?

Migrating to in-house

With ‘middleman’ businesses shut, direct-to-consumer brands, such as Birchbox, SimplyCook and Made.com, are becoming increasingly popular amongst consumers. There is now an increase in demand for digital services, as more traditional businesses realise their future is tied to getting their digital storefronts up, running and delivering. In today’s ultra-competitive, fast-paced digital landscape, efficiency and accuracy are imperative, not the nice-to-have they were until recently. Brands and businesses are realising how mission-critical it is to be able to cut costs but still keep up with the competition and even grow.

One way of meeting these pressures is to bring everything back in-house. It’s one small step for a marketer, but one giant leap for marketers. Yet this ‘new normal’ has shone a light on the benefits. In-housing is something that has been talked about widely over the last decade and has partly been propelled by tech, AI, and programmatic. Programmatic is only getting more efficient (and therefore complex) amid the coronavirus outbreak which is putting greater stress and demand on digital properties and media assets. As digital media becomes increasingly reliant on programmatic, brands that are now focussed on every penny of their budget are looking to areas where their own spend might be wasted on undeserved external margins. Even long-established brands that have always been agency reliant are looking in-house – Marks and Spencer recently announced that it has launched its own in-house creative team.

Being able to own, analyse, and harness your own data and resulting brand messaging, see quicker campaign optimisation and keep greater creative control are some of the many reasons why brands are taking things in-house. And it can be done without needing significant investment in internal talent, thanks to the latest developments in tech.

But why in-housing?

92% of CMO’s and senior marketers are planning to maintain or increase in-house capabilities for programmatic and digital advertising. One of the other main reasons for gravitating towards in-housing is transparency. Agencies are often torn between reporting actual data and polishing the numbers to make them look better. One of the biggest advantages of in-housing and using self-service tools is that you get to own your data. Teams will get the full picture of what’s going on – and can react accordingly.

Tracking marketing spend and ROI doesn’t come without challenges, but once you lose control of who is doing that and where your money is going – think someone else test driving the car you might buy – how can you be convinced of performance? Gaining insight into the actual cost of media and becoming fully aware as to why an ad was served on a particular page is something brands want and need.

Moving ad/media campaigns in-house also comes with huge challenges for even big brands. Fortunately, the onus is no longer on brands to recruit a full digital marketing team – it could be as simple as replacing an out-sourced agency with an in-house platform. A digital marketing adage of the last five years has been to ‘outsource all but the core competencies’, and for many departments of a business, this is still the case. But in a world where marketing is now multi-disciplinary and requires copy skills, tech skills, graphic design skills and (often forgotten) actual marketing skills, there now exist programmatic ad platforms that can become as essential to you as Salesforce is to your sales teams, but with full control.

SaaS is winning

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is an area that is likely to explode as we exit lockdown and return to normal. A SaaS-based model makes sense for the advertiser, the programmatic partner (DSP) and the publisher. By charging a simple subscription fee for the programmatic buying platform, cost- efficient buying and scale spending efficiencies develop.

With fixed subscription pricing, savings become a businesses’ own savings when running campaigns at scale. There is also consistency, transparency and control over how much the advertiser is spending on media spend and a trackable overview of ROI. Ultimately, SaaS media and ad platforms are helping brands to adopt a new type of business model focusing on creating a more cost-effective and transparent programmatic media supply chain. With this type of technology, new and emerging DTC brands may never need support from a traditional media agency. Spending less and getting more – it’s not a pipedream in a world of digital disruption as many consumer-facing businesses have found.

Brand future

Spurred on by Covid and the race to succeed in this second wave of digital disruption, businesses are radically changing. With technology like SaaS and teams now encompassing a wider variety of digital and data skills, many start-ups will keep their media in-house, only partnering with an external agency when they need help with one particular skill or project. In five, ten, fifteen years the media agency as it currently exists may be a relic of the past, as technology and teams develop and adapt in our fast-paced world.

The post Why DTC Brands Born Today Might Never Use a Media Agency appeared first on PerformanceIN.

There are a variety of digital identity solutions being developed to help marketers understand audiences in a post-cookie world, and these fall into three broad categories:

Cohort models

Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is Google’s answer to digital identity, and it clusters individuals together based on a shared browsing history. More accurate than cookies, this method uses algorithms to build anonymous groups of user profiles based on common interests, which is useful for driving top-of-the-funnel metrics such as brand awareness and recognition. While FLoC delivers scale, targeting is constrained to Chrome, rather than cross browser, and there are some unanswered questions around user privacy and measurement.

Authenticated identity

Authenticated or deterministic identity enables precise targeting through a piece of personally identifiable information – such as an email address – that users provide when they log into a website or app. It enables highly accurate targeting and measurement as it is tied to a real person, and can be privacy compliant as it makes consent simple to track. Authenticated identity enables marketers to reach users at the bottom of the funnel and drive customer retention, loyalty and intent. It does, however, require users both to log in and to opt into data processing, which inevitably limits scale. The authenticated web is only expected to reach around 20% of users for the foreseeable future.

Non-authenticated identity

Non-authenticated or probabilistic identity uses publicly available data signals such as IP address, timestamp or browser user agent, to assign a cluster of devices and browser signals to a single identifier. This identifier can be activated via established pipes, enabling precise targeting across devices and domains, as well as frequency measurement.

While it is not tied to a known individual, non-authenticated identity delivers the scale that authenticated identity can’t, and is ideal for prospecting and other middle-of-the-funnel use cases. Probabilistic is data minimised with no email, home address or phone number required, scoring points for consumer privacy and ensuring that no brute force attack on an encrypted ID can reveal an email or a phone number.

As each digital identity category has benefits and drawbacks – and is suited to different levels of the funnel – likely the most effective approach is to combine all of the above. Marketers can also include non-identity solutions such as contextual, which enables interest-based advertising by targeting the user based solely on the content of the page. A portfolio of solutions maximises scale and accuracy while respecting user privacy and delivering strong campaign results.

The post WTF is Digital Identity? appeared first on PerformanceIN.

Havas Media Group (HMG) announced that it has formed a partnership Spaceback, the social display platform, to bring the creativity of social advertising to programmatic on a global scale.

This partnership will allow marketers to distribute social experiences using programmatic infrastructure, adapting any posts from across the major platforms in just a few seconds. This will benefit clients as the agency begins to integrate social and programmatic.

By capitalising on the effort and investment put into messaging and creativity for social and translating it across programmatic, this partnership changes that. Programmatic activation increases the scale of paid social investment, benefitting from real-time engagement insights and amplifying high-impact units at speed across display and video. 

Casey Saran, CEO and co-founder of Spaceback said: “In the future, meaningful media will power all media plans, not just social plans. Our new partnership with Havas unlocks the true potential of programmatic and will inspire brands around the world to revisit their siloed approach to media channels.”

Havas Media Group has also completed the organisational transition of its digital expertise into biddable teams. Now, experts across programmatic and social operate hand in hand to deliver more meaningful media experiences within and beyond social walled gardens.  

James Gyngell, Global Managing Director of Partnerships at Havas Media Group said: “Spaceback awakens the programmatic experience with highly engaging social content, a long-awaited innovation for an industry running the same types of ads for over 15 years,” said “Spaceback provides the technology, and our re-organization provides the structure and talent needed to forge a new frontier for brands.” 

What about the negatives?

If a company does not have as much experience with social as it does other types of programmatic, it may struggle to create effective campaigns. However, in 2019, eMarketer predicted that by 2021, 57.6% of money spent on programmatic ads would go to social media. Keeping up with competitors is hugely important in this case.

Due to coronavirus, the pre-pandemic estimates were incorrect, with the programmatic digital display ad spending growth estimate for 2020 (17.5%) being revised downward in October to 9.4%. However, social media is unlikely to lose popularity at any point in the near future, so it seems programmatic social ads will continue to be a success.

In our siloed industry it is truly a positive to see the forging of relationships between the different areas. Hopefully we continue to see an increase in partnerships similar to this, as I’m sure they will be a driving force to undo the silos and result in positive, useful relationships.

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