Programmatic Ads
are an advancement in digital advertising that levels the playing field between
small and large competitors by automating the bidding process. It’s a concept
that cuts through and makes obsolete the manual bidding of ad placement. As
well as reducing the amount of time a marketing team spends placing online ads,
it can also target your most likely customers more effectively and provide you
with a better chance of getting ahead of the competition.
Programmatic ads are an offering from the bright minds at Google.
Collectively, it’s Google DoubleClick Bid Manager, Display and Video 260 all
rolled into a single practice of ads management.
By using the power of the data available on the internet,
programmatic ads is a way of using algorithms, instead of a manual system to
place ads. While the pay-per-click business model revolutionised online
advertising, it also necessitated the inefficient and time-consuming task of
bidding on where, when and how often a particular ad would appear.
The new practice streamlines the bidding process by automating a
lot of the decisions and using various data such as interests, region, and
demographics to decide the best particular ad placement target audience. The
practice also uses AI to add additional focus to the process.
Effective and Efficient Customer Targeting
Market ‘prospecting’ provides a hint to the often mediocre results
that occurred. In traditional marketing, prospecting referred to directly
contacting a demographic or region of potential buyers to gauge their acceptance
of a brand’s products or services. Depending on the level of this acceptance, a
marketing company would decide on whether launching an expensive ad campaign
would be financially worth the expense or effort. It was literally like digging
a hole to find out whether or not you struck gold.
Although, the results were positive enough to warrant the
laborious effort of market prospecting, the hit or miss aspect of the exercise
was often frustrating, especially when time was often a consideration. Time spent
prospecting while the competition was employing other, more fruitful marketing
strategies, led to prospecting often being avoided if at all possible.
Digital Assistance
But now, with the assistance of digital algorithms, and AI
enhancements to the process, prospecting is enjoying a resurgence. With the
lightning-quick speed that algorithms provide, prospecting is seen as just
another useful part of the process of finding the right audience appeal
to.
By using historical data of a brand’s sales, programmatic ads
focus on the most likely buyers and narrows them down to the most likely
candidates out of those buyers to respond to a particular type of ad. It then
assigns a value to the ad. This value is then used in an automated bidding
process that knows whether to exceed or stay below a particular competing bid
in the purchase of ad space.
Programmatic ads are revitalising the online advertising approach
for millions of advertisers. It helps small brands compete effectively against
larger brands in their industry and speeds up the entire ad bidding process.
