Brand Data Fuels Programmatic

Transcription

1 Brand Data Fuels Programmatic 1

2 With programmatic taking an ever-greater share of digital budgets, advertisers need to be aware that the lack of brand data in the automated systems that increasingly determine where and when messages appear is a critical gap. Retargeting and short-term behavioural responses are key measures of advertising success in the programmatic paradigm. However, such an approach ignores many of the brand learnings that are critical for consumer engagement, such as social setting, moods and emotions and intrinsic media perceptions/ usage to refine placement in traditional media. To be successful, advertisers need to use brand relationship data to inform the inputs to their campaign as well as using it to assess long-term contributions to brand health. In particular, brand data needs to play a key role in both targeting and creative development. With programmatic taking an ever-greater share of digital budgets, it needs to be part of this journey. Only then will data-driven media planning and buying truly deliver on its promise to hit the right person, at the right time, with the right message. Some brands are currently waking up to the value of their first-party data. They have the means to manage and action this data to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing. Traditionally, such data has been used solely for CRM or direct marketing purposes, but to make their programmatic buying more effective they need to start collecting and managing such information to facilitate advertising targeting and message customisation. This is not an overnight change and, for the many brands that haven t reached this stage yet, a good place to start would be an audit of existing data and the creation of a data strategy. This should cover sourcing, storing, enriching and deploying data. Once brands have collected and stored the data, they need to ensure it remains fresh and can be sensitively applied to improving the targeting of marketing messages. Subject to permissions, brands should also look at monetising this data. Application of this rich, accessible, fresh data will help brands resolve key questions about target consumers and make their programmatic strategy more effective and efficient. They will be able to distinguish whether consumers are searching for their products because they are in-market for them or because they are simply interested but often can t afford to buy them. 2

3 As more brands come to rely more heavily on emotional connections with consumers as points of differentiation, the need to link key emotions to other behaviours and activities (such as media use and category consumption, for example) becomes increasingly important. Only by including brand understanding in their programmatic strategy can they ensure that they better understand their customers preferences, lifestyles, demographics, and path to purchase and target effectively. Brand owners (and their agencies) need to address four key areas: Sourcing new data: This can range from utilising social media-friendly competitions to selling direct to consumers and building proprietary e-commerce sites. Competitions are not just about engagement or driving consumers to specific sites but represent great opportunities to capture data about a brand s consumers and their relationship with it. While the decision to commit to direct-to-consumers is substantial, the opportunity to engage with consumers and know their habits and preferences can be a major benefit. It provides an incredibly rich source of consumer data (usually controlled by retailers) delivering insights into consumer needs. A major packaged goods conglomerate, for example, gets less than 1% of its sales through its estore but views the site as a valuable way to better understand its consumers. Moving from targeting to personalisation: An IBM study found 90% of customers want better personalisation, and are willing to spend time to build profiles that help retailers give them a better experience. However, the same study discovered that less than a third of retailers are able to accommodate this growing consumer desire. This can be tricky. Personalisation, like retargeting, quickly resembles stalking if not applied sensitively. Personalisation extends beyond welcome messages and product recommendations ( if you liked this, try these ) to reconfiguring other advertising messages. Making messaging relevant: Generating different creative executions to different consumer segments based on brand and product preferences is a good place to start. A good content marketing programme starts from the premise that the most effective content creator is the brand. A brand s ability to tell effective stories is reliant on clear brand data. Content needs to be tailored to brand preference and category interest as well as context to be effective. Extend brand knowledge offline: Mining digital behavioural data can encourage a purely digital activation but it can also inform offline media planning and buying. With anonymous data from mobile networks, for example, brands now have access to a deeper understanding of audience movements and behaviour. This allows more efficient deployment of out-of-home (OOH) advertising against specific commuter groups throughout their journey. 3

4 The Media Owner Opportunity Media owners too are sitting on valuable insights about their own consumers. Traditional media owners and online publishers use content to attract category interest and planners have used content type to refine traditional media selection. Much more can be accomplished, however. Improvement to the way publishers collect, store and manage data concerning the consumers of the media will help them justify premium positioning and tell brands more about the emotional response of their users. We are seeing moves in TV and OOH to make these media more addressable and enable potential programmatic buying. Some TV stations are launching data management platforms to enable advertisers and agencies to plan and buy programming based not on traditional sample-based TV ratings, but in a way that is akin to how agencies and trading desks buy audiences online. Publishers can vertically integrate more of the advertising process from targeting through to creative development, particularly for branded content. Some magazine publishers are using their own in-house native content teams. Publishers are more inclined to treat their audiences as people, as opposed to ad tech who lean towards thinking of them as numbers. The Ad Tech Limitation Programmatic systems promise the earth about reaching the right person. They tell advertisers about the hundreds of data points they collate to ensure that messages are highly targeted. Most of these data points, however, relate to past, or at least recent, online behaviours, which may not be the best targeting variables. To be really effective, we need to understand the relationship that the target has with the brand being advertised. We know that a strong brand relationship will influence the attitudinal response to advertising and may also shorten the time to decision-making when making a purchase. The frequency with which we advertise to such consumers will be lower and the messages we convey would be different. For example, a consumer who is a fan of Apple will need only a small number of messages to ensure they stick with the brand when their mobile contract comes up for renewal. However, someone who was not an Apple fan would need considerably more effort to ensure that the latest iphone earns a place on their consideration set. Ad tech companies need to become more honest and transparent about the limitations of the current marketplace and work hard to incorporate cost-effective brand relationship data into the targeting algorithms. The agencies that work with them also need to be sensitive to ad receptivity and avoidance. They need to let targeting demonstrate awareness of interest rather than stalking. Given the current state of the 4

5 technology, they need to work to balance the cost-efficiency of programmatic with the effectiveness of more traditional manual media selection. The Research Challenge As researchers we need to revisit our archives of brand data. We possess huge amounts of brand relationship data. This data could transform programmatic targeting. We need to become first-party data providers. We often have databases used for benchmarking and norms, but an ad tech expert coming into our business would say we could do so much more. We need to look at how our data can contribute to a new paradigm of right time, right place and right message. The challenge is to make available brand relationship data that can facilitate the right approach in a programmatic context. As researchers we are concerned about the importance of understanding brand outcomes of advertising. For marketing directors, however, the lure of short-term sales and behaviour changes feels more tangible and translates straight to the bottom line. We need to focus more strongly on how we can provide inputs into the advertising planning process and demonstrate the value of brand relationship in targeting the right person with the right message. If all sides fail to take such steps then programmatic systems will continue to be based on behavioural cues. In sending out messages based on the idea that the closer to a decision a message arrives, the more effective it is, these systems perpetuate a misattribution that is staggering. The truth, of course, is that ads closer to point of purchase do not drive the decision to change behaviour alone but harvest attitudinal response created much earlier. The misattribution of brand power in favour of location and activity represents a bigger issue than even last click wins. Only by adding brand data to the inputs can we change this. This article was first published in the March 2016 issue of AdMap Millward Brown 5