Data Management Platforms: Enabling Better Business
Data is at the core of all marketing and advertising operations today. Without it, companies would have no direction, let alone any edge over competition. They all know it, but only a few understand. For others, there are data management platforms (DMP) to help marketers and publishers make sense of it all. A data management platform is like a data warehouse software that houses and manages information (for example, cookie IDs) to assist in tasks such as generating audience segments and targeting clusters. Advertisers today communicate to a number pf publishers and buy media across a huge range of sites. DMPs collate information on all those activities in a centralized location and use them to optimize future media buys and ad requirements. Essentially, using a DMP is all about better segmenting, profiling and targeting customers. An enterprise DMP can scale millions of data points and offer marketers insights on a host of market and campaign variables. What do DMPs offer? The benefits: Prospecting: DMPs seamlessly integrate with third-party customer data. This way, they help in achieving higher accuracy and scaling better with targeted campaigns. Re-targeting: Businesses can analyze buying records, browsing behavior and customer profile, among others, using DMPs. Using online and offline variables, they help in implementing customized re-targeting campaigns. Audience segmentation: DMPs allow marketers to create several granular as well as broad segments. This way, marketers are able to reach out to audiences with the right message at different stages of the purchase cycle. Optimized site content: By using third-party data, DMPs gauge customer profiles and offer personalized content to users when they visit the brand’s site. Analytics: With DMPs, companies need not maintain cumbersome excel sheets. DMPs have inbuilt dashboards that provide measures and compare campaign performance across channels, give insight into audience interaction, etc. These reports help marketers optimize and channelize marketing efforts in the best possible way. Of brands, customers and ROIs New brands are growing by the day, and making the marketplace even more cluttered. So much so that consumers are now developing a ‘blind-spot’ for advertisements. Hence, it is of supreme importance that marketers channelize their efforts in a way that the right message reaches the right people; people who have a high possibility to earn value by investing in the brand. DMPs help marketers effectively analyze all their disparate audience and campaign data, allowing them to make better media buying decisions, target prospects, and offer personalized content leading to higher brand awareness and conversion. With DMP capabilities, brands can judge the effectiveness of marketing efforts and optimally alter and implement them. Such platforms also help brands to better connect with consumers by setting in place a platform to reach out for quick customer service. All in all, it is a win- win situation for marketers; with access to valuable business insights, they can reduce wastage of resources, scale operations and ultimate earn a higher ROI.
Video Ads are a Huge Hit with Millennials
In a study identifying major celebrities popular among the youngsters (aged between 18 and 30) YouTube superstars topped the list. Millennials have been found flocking mostly to videos recently. These video sites are reaching more than any other networking media across people within the age group 18-35 (Source: Sprinklr.com). Every year the time spent on watching videos is growing by 60%, average video watching on mobile being higher than 40 minutes. This provides a huge opportunity for advertisers to specifically design ads for videos targeting millennials. The advertisers on video channels like YouTube have grown higher than 40% and the big companies are trying to capture millennials on other video sites as well (Defy-sponsored survey in 2014). It is the time spent by millennials on YouTube and Google Video that has resulted on top brands (rankings by Interbrand) spending almost 60% more on these channels than they did a decade ago (around 2005). Although site owners are not explicitly coming out with revenue figures, the available data indicates there is an explosion of demand for video advertisements. Advertisers have found millennials spending substantial time on these sites. Also, Google has said there is a huge growth in revenue from YouTube recently. The influx of advertisements has made many video sites turn their platforms more appealing for advertisers. They created a computing systems and dashboards where marketers can compare effectiveness of video ads with television advertising. A recent survey on millennial women found the main influencing factors for their shopping decisions to be websites, social media and word of mouth. See figure below. Source: AdWeek Guided by the huge popularity of video networks, many renowned brands on television and the internet are coming up with new video channels. They are trying to cover topics that interest the age group of 18-49 mainly, some specifically catering to the audience looking for answers to questions continuously. For brands trying to capture this vibrant and media-proactive group of millennials, video advertisements offer immense potential. Using a comprehensive campaign management solution, you can design your content and run it across the video networks to find maximum conversions happening within a short time. Make sure your products and your ads match the intellectual and emotional worlds of these millennials, and your job is almost accomplished.
What’s So Cool about OOH Advertising?
It consists of public display ads, both digital and print, but the plus side is you can choose your OOH ads to be displayed at particular locations according to how demographics travel run errands. Digital displays can be easily controlled in real-time, according to the movements of people with specific tastes and needs. OOH has evolved, thanks to big data! Big data allows the discovery of detailed information on specific groups of people. Based on that, OOH campaigns can be displayed to prospects from particular cultures, age groups, and professions at specific locations, and thousands of them can be targeted once you are aware of their movements. A greater-than-life ad is something no one misses. Outdoor media platforms may include posters, billboards, public vehicles, kiosks, etc. OOH is cost-effective OOH advertising can be cost-effective to promote a brand or service. An OOH advertisement is a one-time investment. You can ideally keep an ad running for both, short and long terms, depending on context and objective. The price you pay for OOH ad spaces largely depends on popularity, footfall and other related factors. However, once you mine data, a location relevant to your demographics may be available at a surprisingly affordable cost. And that happens quite often. OOH has better reach It is true that personalized ads have a conversion rate of 80% on average. However, viewability and fraud have been major challenges in the recent past. Although many OOH “impressions” may be irrelevant, a whacky ad gets people’s attention. That gets the word around. Moreover, with big data, the right prospects can be reached at strategic locations quite easily these days. Outdoor ads reach a wider range of viewers. Compelling viewership is one of the highest advantages of OOH advertising. Programmatic advertising has been a remarkable development in the last few years, but affordability, scope of creativity, non-stop exposure to audience, and potential reach to large audiences are some undeniable advantages of OOH.
User Identification in Programmatic Advertising and Other Challenges
Without a ‘proxy’ to accurately identify individuals, programmatic marketing is simply unmanageable. While cookies have been the proxy for identification, it’s time to ask about the future. Programmatic experts are yet to figure out a way, but if cookies are dying out, programmatic will surely face a threat. The cookie seems to have been doing a great job. Reports from Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found total digital revenue reaching $12.4 billion in the last quarter of 2014. Programmatic is basically a combination of different kinds of technologies that buy, place, and optimize advertising automatically, and hence enables highly profitable ad campaigns. As the job of programmatic is to identify the right viewer and make that viewer see the ad, the first thing required is a real viewer. Unfortunately, some rogues in the web world are capable of misleading even the smartest software programs. Challenges like viewability and fraud are constantly troubling the world of programmatic. Most advertisers shy away from programmatic buying because of the looming presence of reputation concerns and fraud. As of May 2015, the leading hurdles in using programmatic ad buying in UK and USA were statistically evaluated from a survey: Leading Challenges in Programmatic Buying, 2015 (UK and USA) – % of survey participants More than half the traffic on websites is essentially bot traffic. It has been estimated that more than $6.3 billion damage will be experienced because of bots. Hence, out of an estimated $43.8 billion, if more than $6 billion is fraudulent activity (fake clicks through a set of automated software programs), it is a huge loss for advertisers. Huge organizations with complete set ups operate with botnet malwares to extract millions of dollars. For folks in programmatic, ad impression viewability continues to remain a huge challenge around online display ads. In order for an ad to qualify as viewable, a minimum 50% of its pixels should appear on desktop screens for at least one second. For video ads, 50% pixels should be viewable for at least 2 seconds. These challenges may be confronted by micromanaging customized platforms. Advertisers need to use technology that maximizes outcomes. It’s not enough to seek impressions or aim at a single behavior pattern for producing the desired results. It is necessary to depend on technology that executes the numerous conditions correctly for ad-space selection. By using such a platform, advertisers with different needs can improve their ROIs in clear-cut ways.