Use Reporting Insights to Increase Engagement while Avoiding Oversaturation
July 09, 2024 |
Helen Bartkiewicz
Ads are everywhere
From desktops, laptops, TVs, and mobile devices to billboards and kiosks, ads truly are everywhere you turn today. The number of digital ads served across all platforms continues to grow year-over-year, with an especially significant increase of 13.2% predicted for the end of 2024. An additional 11.0% increase is expected for the 2025 calendar year.
With millions of campaigns representing hundreds of thousands of brands being launched across various combinations of media platforms each year, audiences can get lost and overwhelmed within the sea of ads. Certain brands who have higher advertising budgets can often unintentionally deter future customers through oversaturation. If everywhere a person turns they see the same brand, or even the same exact ad, they may build an aversion to the brand rather than an interest to purchase.
Excessive marketing has been proven to deter target audiences. The majority of social media users (around 57.7%) have admitted to unfollowing a brand due to excessive advertising. So advertisers now wonder: How can I reach my target audience in the most cost-effective way without bombarding them from every angle?
Picking the right combination of media types
Each target audience is unique in its own way, and each audience has its own preferences when it comes to engaging with digital ads. While some people listen to audio podcasts on a daily basis, others prefer to browse web pages or watch online videos in their spare time.
Honing in on your audience’s habits with the help of robust analytical insights is the key to maximizing ROAS in the ever-growing realm of digital advertising. As media type combinations continue to expand from the cornerstone display, native, and video offerings into CTV, programmatic audio, HTML5, and Digital out of Home (DOOH), finding the right combination for each campaign can take some finesse.
Transparent analytics to aid with strategy
In order to avoid oversaturating the target audience, advertisers should rely heavily on analytic insights. Reports such as campaign analytics and site analytics provide the data, analysis, and recommendations necessary to decide where and how to appropriately allocate ad spend.
With the help of robust, transparent analytics reports at each and every step of the campaign journey, agencies and their brands can refocus their strategic marketing efforts on which media formats lead to the highest engagement rates among target audiences, and readjust their campaign budgets to reach the right people in the ways they prefer, without overwhelming them.
The foolproof way to avoid oversaturating your target audience is the effective analysis and application of reporting insights. Using insights from campaign analytics reports, including KPI-based data and audience engagement levels, will help you shape your overarching strategy and concentrate your targeting – and retargeting – efforts. Adjust your campaign media mix according to the data collected in these reports, so you can connect with your audience where they are the most engaged without deterring them.
Trust in AdDaptive’s accurate targeting and reporting to elevate your campaign strategy and reach key audiences without oversaturation.
LinkedIn is inarguably a leader in both the social media world and the digital advertising world, accounting for almost 25% of US B2B digital ad spending this year. Business professionals specifically trust the LinkedIn platform above any other social media site for thought leadership, career development, networking, and much more.
As the most trusted business social media platform, LinkedIn’s growth isn’t expected to slow down any time soon. The predicted year-over-year growth rate is 14.1% for LinkedIn advertising in 2024. To further fuel this growth, LinkedIn has introduced a new Media Planning API to help advertisers maximize their campaign ROI.
While the media giant continues to expand their in-network targeting capabilities, there are still many opportunities to complement LinkedIn ads with other solutions and deliver display, native, video, CTV, audio, and HTML5 ads across a variety of platforms for a comprehensive, omnichannel advertising approach. Over 75% of digital ad spend in the US still falls outside of LinkedIn. So how can advertisers adjust their campaign strategies to maximize their reach and KPIs?
Expanding digital advertising strategies beyond social media
There is no denying that LinkedIn ads have proven to be highly effective, especially in recent months. Advertisers have seen over 20% ROI on LinkedIn campaigns so far in 2024, despite the 30% price surge at the beginning of the year.
However, LinkedIn ads are still restricted to the LinkedIn platform itself. LinkedIn may be the best social media platform for business advertisers, but complementing social with the value of programmatic is the true key to reaching target audiences where they are engaged and maximizing ROAS. Increasing the number of touchpoints by delivering a well-rounded combination of display, native, video, CTV, audio, and HTML5 ads increases the likelihood of your intended audience engaging with your content.
Launching a complementary programmatic advertising campaign alongside your LinkedIn social media campaign can significantly increase brand awareness, website traffic, impressions, and conversions, just to name a few KPIs.
Target with accuracy – and without limits
AdDaptive’s targeting and reporting solutions can help you reach your target audiences beyond social media platforms. The world wide web is your oyster with programmatic advertising, so you can reach your target audiences with as many touchpoints as are needed to inform, engage, and inspire action. Whether the ad is display, native, video, CTV, audio, or HTML5, expanding your media mix across a variety of platforms beyond social media significantly increases your chances of connecting with key accounts.
AdDaptive’s solutions can effectively complement your LinkedIn advertising strategy, elevating your campaigns with accurate targeting, robust campaign reports, and in-depth analyses and recommendations. Our strength in matching offline data to online identifiers also fills a gap which cookies will leave behind in the wake of their impending removal.
Partner with AdDaptive to complement your LinkedIn campaigns and significantly increase your chances of reaching your target audience.
Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit May 2024 Recap
June 05, 2024 |
Helen Bartkiewicz
Digiday just held their bi-annual Programmatic Marketing Summit May 15-17 in sunny Palm Springs, CA. As always, AdDaptive was a proud sponsor of the event at the Ritz Carlton, Rancho Mirage, where agency executives and industry professionals gathered for three days to discuss the current challenges, strategic shifts, and solutions available to advertisers.
The conference was jam-packed with town halls, 8 minute meetings, lunches, dinners, receptions, activities, and presentations featuring 22 keynote speakers, including AdDaptive’s VP of Sales, Ted McNulty. McNulty’s presentation, titled “Leverage offline data for more accurate, scalable, and transparent campaigns,” took place on the first day of the conference, May 15, just before the first round of 8 minute meetings pictured above.
The challenge board reveals all
The challenge board has become infamous at the numerous annual Digiday summits. Attendees are invited to share the one main challenge that their agency is currently facing in a quick post-it note in order to spark conversation with other agencies who are experiencing similar challenges, and with vendors who can provide potential solutions.
Some of the keywords that appeared on the challenge board at May’s Programmatic Marketing Summit included: differentiation, measurement, transparency, cookieless, partnership, digital, and branding.
The hottest topics covered during the various sessions and presentations at the conference encompassed many of these keywords, further proving the value of attending Digiday events.
Said topics included the ever-delayed deprecation of cookies, attribution, and building trust with ad tech partners. These themes have been prominent at all of the Digiday summits over the course of the last year or so, confirming their importance as they continue to remain top-of-mind for agencies.
Will cookies ever actually go away?
Last month Google announced the third delay in their plan to deprecate cookies, and advertisers are growing increasingly more skeptical about whether cookies will ever be completely removed from Chrome. Before April’s announcement, the platform was expected to be cookie-free by the end of 2024. Now that date has been bumped to some time in 2025.
Though the deadline for the removal of third-party cookies from Google Chrome remains ever-prolonged, cookieless targeting solutions are the future-proof option for digital advertisers. Programmatic advertising is the seamless next step as the industry shifts away from a reliance on cookie-based targeting. AdDaptive’s cookieless solution, for example, has proven its success by bridging validated offline data sources to unique online identifiers for accurate targeting and reporting for over 14 years.
Truly accurate attribution
Speaking of accurate reporting, attribution was once again a buzzword at the Summit. Since programmatic campaigns lend themselves to an omnichannel approach, launching simultaneously across various platforms in a combination of media types, KPI tracking can often lead to overlaps in data.
Which click actually sealed the deal?
The only way to know is by using the most accurate reporting technology in the industry. Truly accurate attribution is only attainable through forming an ad tech partnership with a trusted digital advertising solution provider, such as AdDaptive.
Build a partnership with a trusted ad tech vendor
AdDaptive’s on-site team at Digiday: Jonathan Gravallese, Marisa Modoono, Joe Paratore, Mike Powell, and Ted McNulty
The number of vendors in the industry just keeps growing year over year. How can advertisers possibly choose between them all? The answer is just one word: trust. If it feels like “taking a chance” with a new ad tech vendor, they aren’t the right partner. Find a solution provider with proven success, who offers full transparency to put your mind at ease.
Knowing what data is being accessed and how exactly it’s used to target key audiences helps soften any doubts about running new campaigns. For over 14 years now, AdDaptive has successfully connected validated real-world data sources such as SEC filings, building permits, census data, and much more to unique online identifiers for extremely accurate targeting. Since 2010 we’ve worked with over 500 agencies and launched tens of thousands of campaigns, none of which have ever relied on third-party cookies.
Trust in AdDaptive’s future-proof technology to target with accuracy and scale so you can maximize ROAS.
Breaking Through the Noise with a Tailored Advertising Approach
February 28, 2023 |
Matt Shore
Capturing attention can be difficult in the B2B advertising space, but the ability to tailor your approach to your audience’s preferences can help you break through the noise. By leveraging insights gathered from analytics reports and strategic conversations, you can unlock the full picture of your target audience. When utilized effectively, you can help build brand awareness and trust as well as provide the tools necessary to push prospects through the funnel by way of individualized conversations between sales and target accounts.
How exactly does this process work?
Once your target audience has been defined and your ad campaign has deployed, AdDaptive provides performance updates throughout the flight via the Campaign Analytics report. After the flight ends, you will receive the Site Analytics report showing which of the targeted accounts are interacting with your client’s website via your ad campaign. These actionable analytics paired with strategic conversations with our experts will give you a holistic view of your audience and the types of content that resonate with them.
Now it’s time to use what you’ve learned to break through the noise.
When you know your audience’s preferences, you can tailor your advertising approach to fit their needs. Build brand awareness and trust by sending engaging marketing emails to colder prospects to stay top of mind rather than being labeled “just another email notification.” Sales teams can leverage engagement data from said emails to initiate individualized conversations with prospects to meet them where they are in the buying process and begin building relationships. Think of this like sending a birthday card to a friend. You could sign your name at the bottom of a store-bought card with a generic birthday wish, but taking time to write a more personal message would stand out and show that you understand their needs.
What does this look like in practice?
In your Site Analytics report, you might notice one of your prospects has spent significant time on the “product features” tab on your client’s website. Your client’s sales team can take advantage of this info by reaching out to the prospect with the right message at the right time. For example, they could say “Hi (insert name here), we noticed you were exploring our product features page and thought you might be interested in this one-sheet explaining our solution a little more in-depth. Do you have any questions I could help answer?” This way prospects are being met where they are in their independent research process and are being provided another piece of content that will keep them informed, engaged, and moving through the funnel.
Let’s keep the prospects moving.
As prospect relationships grow, continued individualized conversations will help propel them towards purchase. With each campaign you will be able to learn more about your audience and hone in on the things that matter most to them. Just by simply running your ad campaign and interpreting your analytics reports through strategic conversations with our experts, you will know your client’s target audience best. Now you can provide exactly what prospects are looking for, making their buying process quick and easy.
Actionable analytics and a strategic partnership with AdDaptive are the most important tools for building lasting relationships with your prospects and tailoring your advertising approach to your target accounts’ needs. Laying a strong foundation of brand awareness and trust through individualized conversations with prospects will not only help push prospects through the funnel but keep them coming back again and again.
That’s the AdDaptive Advantage.
Ready to speak with a digital advertising expert? Book a meeting below.
Programmatic Audio is a powerful addition to the B2B marketer’s media plan with high impact and trackable ads that reach professional audiences where they are intently engaged. With ample visual stimulation in the work day, professionals often refer to other channels for news, professional development, or relaxation, such as podcasts, streaming music, or radio. And according to eMarketer, by 2021, the average US adult will spend 86.88 minutes a day with digital audio (source) cementing it as a key component of your B2B advertising strategy.
AdDaptive’s new audio offering can be used alone or in combination with other media types including Display, Video, B2B Sponsored Content, and CTV. In fact, marketers are finding that adding an audio element to your media plan is an excellent way to balance visual ads for an unobtrusive yet well-rounded experience.
The most impressive aspect of this new offering is that AdDaptive’s industry-leading B2B ABM Analytics can be used to support audio ads and funnel audience insights back into your campaign for the most intelligent targeting and campaign excellence.
Download AdDaptive’s Overview of Programmatic Audio Advertising to learn more about the benefits of this expanded offering:
Programmatic CTV ad buying has created waves in B2B ad tech as internet connected devices have extended along with the virtual workplace. Previously, Linear (traditional) TV was touted for its reach — the ability to reach large audiences indiscriminately. However, reach must be coupled with accuracy in order to produce powerful results, and programmatic ad buying does just that with its ability to target B2B professionals with verified online and offline data. AdDaptive’s B2B CTV solution provides unrivaled accuracy through its programmatic approach and unparalleled post-campaign reporting. Leveraging a programmatic, data-driven approach to ad inventory positions CTV for advanced B2B targeting and accuracy — and for the first time ever, analytics.
Expanding beyond Linear TV and towards a programmatic, data-driven approach to ad inventory positions CTV for advanced B2B targeting and accuracy–and for the first time ever, analytics.
AdDaptive’s Programmatic Approach to B2B CTV
Download this two-pager to explore the benefits of a programmatic approach to B2B CTV in comparison to Linear TV and find out why the programmatic approach to ad inventory is the future of CTV .
When the first banner ad graced the screens of HotWired.com visitors on October 27, 1994, brand safety concerns and “banner blindness” were still decades away. In this time and space, the ideal audience for this ad was everyone. The ad was designed with an adventurous, service-based message influenced by the technological allure of the future. It asked, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE?” then responded with the premonition, “You will” (source). 44% of people clicked on the first banner ad, which is quite a contrast to today’s widely diverse advertising ecosystem where the average click rate is 0.5 % (source). In other words, the ad’s prediction was quite accurate. Millions of people clicked on the first banner ad; since then, millions of banner ads have appeared online thanks to the seismic growth of digital advertising and the introduction of programmatic.
DOMESTIC SPEND ON PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING IS ESTIMATED TO REACH ROUGHLY $60 BILLION IN 2019, ACCORDING TO EMARKETER (source).
Fast forward to November 7th, 2019–the digital world celebrated the first National Programmatic Advertising Day recognizing the many advancements made in digital media. With the introduction of programmatic advertising, the digital advertising climate has evolved to show limitless potential—from marketing with AI to programmatic radio and TV. Domestic spend on programmatic advertising is projected to reach roughly $60 billion in 2019, according to eMarketer. However, with data being the bridge that connects advertisers to their target audiences, marketers and consumers alike have become more privy to transparency and control in digital advertising.
Now, in this new era of digital advertising, an increased emphasis on transparency becomes a differentiator between ad tech companies. For example, companies are now able to power campaign efforts using AI technology. This advantage not only allows companies to be more transparent with their use of data and the reach of the ad campaigns – it also allows them to bridge first- and third-party data faster and more efficiently than humanly possible. Companies with access to advanced insights and analytics are able to use transparent reporting to inform future campaigns–a notable advancement in the industry.
SINCE 1994, DIGITAL ADVERTISING HAS COME A LONG WAY, AND SO HAVE THE SKILLS NEEDED TO CUT THROUGH THE NOISE AND CONTINUALLY DEPLOY SUCCESSFUL AD CAMPAIGNS.
Since 1994, digital advertising has come a long way, and so have the skills needed to cut through the noise and continually deploy successful ad campaigns. Today, as the average person views 1,700 banner ads a month, it not only takes powerful creatives to reach their target audience, but it also requires precise targeting (source). No matter how profound the creative is, it must reach those it will resonate with at the right time. This understanding is where AdDaptive stands out among other prominent ad tech companies. AdDaptive’s technology boosts display (banner), B2B Sponsored Content (native), and video advertising efforts by ensuring you reach your target business audiences at scale while providing valuable audience insights to inform future campaigns. Fueling our intelligent technology with validated, firmographic data means three things: We only serve ads to the decision-makers that matter most, the data used to target your B2B audience is verified, and the insights obtained from each campaign are actionable.
In the past 25 years, the industry has evolved and so has the technology used to ensure ads reach the right audiences. The banner ad is still going strong, but it has been adapted to fit different formats and distribution channels to make the digital advertising world more diverse. The more ads in the ecosystem, the more messages being conveyed in creative ways, and the more information companies have to strategize for future ad campaigns and support their business goals in new ways. The industry has come a long way in 25 years – who knows where we’ll be in 25 more! Regardless of where we land, companies like AdDaptive will continue to tweak their solutions to keep up with the ever-changing digital advertising landscape, embracing the future of the ad tech industry.
Programmatic Continues To Fuel The B2B Digital Advertising Market’s Growth
March 06, 2019 |
Laura Bakopolus Goldstone
AdDaptive’s comprehensive package fills the market gap and offers a differentiated ad tech solution that keeps it ahead of the market
As highlighted in a recent LinkedIn article supported by data from a new eMarketer report, the U.S. B2B digital advertising industry is trending upward and has not yet reached its peak of maturity. Similar to its $1 million growth in 2018, the market is projected to grow 18.7% in 2019, surpassing $6 billion. The growth is attributed to four areas: account-based marketing, people-based marketing, personalized content sequencing, and programmatic.
Many companies in the industry are not able to leverage all of the areas contributing to that growth. In many cases, it wouldn’t make sense for them to do so. Strategic management would have it that in order to identify which core competencies could be exploited to provide a competitive advantage, a company needs to first evaluate its internal resources and capabilities, determine which are valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized around its exploitation (per the VRIO test). Many companies in the B2B digital advertising industry are already leveraging their capabilities as effectively as they are able, and new entrants are hoping to capture market share by providing focused products – point solutions, software, or data. A company might have an excellent ABM solution, an edge on people-based marketing, a superior personalized content sequencing offering, or relationships and technology that position them to provide programmatic advertising that yields favorable results. But few companies are able to offer the total package, as is evident in the aforementioned analysis of the market. The eMarketer report found that many B2B marketers “still lack the foundational data and technology to successfully leverage digital”; LinkedIn adds that “B2B marketers as a group have not yet fully embraced the powerful targeting options offered by digital.” The market will continue to grow and evolve; in the meantime, this is a market gap that industry leaders are working to fill and provide consumers with a well-rounded solution that they cannot find elsewhere.
As one of the early adopters in this market, we’re proud to learn that programmatic advertising is continuing to propel the growth of B2B digital. We’re also proud that we have matured over the past few years in our constant technological innovation, and as a result, we have more to offer than just one of the pillars of growth for our market. We don’t only offer a narrowly focused solution, which may require marketers to go elsewhere and create a network of vendors to get the best of each of their offerings. An easier route for advertisers would be to find one company that offers the most comprehensive package and can yield superior targeting and analytics. That company is AdDaptive.
AdDaptive offers differentiated technology, a unique data set, and world-class service and expertise. We are well-positioned to outpace the growth of the market and solidify ourselves as a leader in the B2B advertising world. If you’re interested in getting an edge up on your competitors, set up a free demo to experience the power of our technology firsthand and explore how our solution can help you reach your marketing goals.
Why Outsourcing Programmatic Advertising Is The Cost-Effective Choice
September 13, 2018 |
Laura Bakopolus Goldstone
Any marketing strategist or planner knows that money matters. You have to keep your spending within the walls of your budget, and you need to monitor your ROI to ensure you are getting value out of your investments. It is imperative that you pay attention to the way your budget is spent and how your company is benefitting as a result. As ad tech is taking up a bigger and bigger piece of the pie as we move deeper into this technological revolution, marketers have to decide if they will attempt to run a programmatic department in-house or outsource it to the experts. In making such an important decision, which cost drivers hold the most weight? More specifically, which costs are most likely to lead brands towards hiring a technology vendor to run their ads programmatically on their behalf?
In a recent eMarketer article entitled, “When Building Ad tech, It’s All About the Costs: Replacing vendors isn’t so easy,” author Ross Benes reviewed data from Iponweb and ExchangeWire surveys conducted this past June among 129 media agency professionals worldwide. One such result showed that 70% of those surveys felt that “the cost of set up and maintenance is an important factor to consider when evaluating whether or not to build their own ad tech,” with other variables like “ease of installation, reach and reporting capabilities” – coming in subsequent positions. Here, we are seeing a common trend: It would be nice to keep services in-house, but money talks.
Recently, brands are realizing that the cost of hiring a technology vendor to run their ads programmatically is far lower and more beneficial than the cost of running them in-house. Ad tech vendors have the resources, capabilities, expertise, and dedication to run ads for you. If you think you can achieve the same success they’ve achieved after pouring their hearts into it for the past decade, you can try, but you will likely find that you can’t afford to dedicate your entire day to programmatic ads or hire full-time workers to do so. Finding the expertise in that area is difficult, since those people are likely working for the vendors themselves. Plus, your technology is likely not as powerful or reliable as companies whose sole product is their technology. Those vendors have dedicated their life’s work to creating the strongest technology to deliver the most accurate results at scale; chances are they are farther along the journey than you are. Why not hire the experts to do it for you? Another big advantage for ad tech vendors is their network of relationships. Companies like AdDaptive have data partners that supply some of the third-party data that fuels our technology and complements clients’ first-party data. Those relationships are being very carefully built over time and often cannot be substituted by a company trying to form them suddenly with the sole purpose of keeping programmatic advertising in-house.
A huge influence on companies aiming to keep programmatic in-house is the level of transparency that has not always been maintained at its highest potential throughout the years in the ad tech industry. While it is understandable for companies to be wary, they should not be tainted by past experiences. Companies like AdDaptive are carving out new paths by providing pre-campaign analytics and post-campaign insights that show a greater level of detail than ever before. Running a B2B campaign with AdDaptive, for example, means your ads are reaching specific individuals at key business accounts that will be most likely to engage with your ads. Before the campaign, you will receive information about which companies and which job titles will be targeted with your ads. After the campaign, you will obtain a report detailing how many impressions were served to each business. (Interested in reading more? Check out our related blog post, “Discover Transparency in B2B Ad Tech.”) That level of transparency is unheard-of in the industry right now, and is slowly changing the perception of the ad tech industry as it becomes more mainstream. Having access to this level of transparency will further justify a marketer’s budgetary decision to outsource programmatic advertising to an experienced tech vendor.
Companies are learning this the hard way, but sometimes, failure is the best teacher. Brands are finding that building tech and committing to a new undertaking of that caliber is simply too expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to hire for. Instead, approximately 70% of media decision-makers (in an April survey of 119 US media decision-makers conducted by Advertiser Perceptions and the IAB) do or would prefer to work with a partner (as opposed to building tech or performing ad ops in-house) (Source).
When evaluated from a different angle, programmatic tech vendors are able to save companies money through their expertise. They have spent years studying and building and learning, and now they commit their entire work day to perfecting this tool. Aren’t they more qualified to use it than perhaps a marketer who has only just heard of it? (Not that everyone will be amateurs in the ad tech space; experts and masters in their fields are by definition more qualified than non-experts.) Even if your day is split 50/50 between building an in-house programmatic ad deployment department and other marketing operations, you are still only working at it half as often as someone else. Time is a valuable resource, and it cannot be understated that programmatic ad tech vendors are committing their entire day to this cause, which is more than a marketer that does anything less than a full day’s work on it.
Furthermore, the return speaks for itself. AdDaptive has the power and expertise to deploy the most effective ad campaigns. If you invest a large sum of money (which it often costs) in developing an in-house programmatic advertising department without having adequate knowledge, your chances of succeeding are probably relatively low (or at least congruent to your knowledge level). If you want to hire a single expert, you need to invest time and money into finding him and securing the right person for the job. More often, though, implementing a successful programmatic in-house program would require hiring a full team, which takes more time and money and can cause changes in your organizational chart or structure. If you want to develop your technology to protect data and promote transparency, as you should – more time and money. So on and so forth. The expenses grow and grow before you see any return, and at the end of the day, you may not be well equipped enough to do it right. Companies are learning to spare themselves the expenses and outsource their programmatic advertising needs. Tech vendors are capable of deploying ads for a much lower cost than brands would spend on in-house tech development. Tech vendors such as AdDaptive can ensure that the impressions are higher quality than your in-house team may be capable of achieving at such an early stage (or perhaps ever), so even if you commit to spending a certain amount of money on your campaign regardless of who does it, the amount you spend with AdDaptive will deliver higher quality impressions (which leads to higher engagement and perhaps more conversions) than lesser technologies. Here is an example of the costs for each requirement of in-house implementation, as opposed to a vendor such as AdDaptive:
Clearly, the difference is staggering.
Lastly, scale is quite possibly the biggest challenge for in-house advertising teams. They may be able to build a strong technology and access reliable data, but can their technology analyze billions of data points each second? Can it scour thousands and thousands of companies in an instant in order to find the right one to target? Can it digest millions of IP addresses in order to find the right ones that align with your key business influencers? Most likely, the answer to those three questions are “no” if you are running programmatic in-house as part of a larger company mission. If you are a brand that needs to focus time on product development, process improvement, inventory management, branding and promotions, and other necessary operations, you likely won’t be able to focus 100% of your company’s efforts on programmatic advertising. Luckily for you, tech vendors can. And they do. Every day. For those ad tech vendors, their programmatic advertising is their product. Companies like AdDaptive live and breathe programmatic ad tech for their clients, and they work hard each and every day to improve the technology, data, and account management so as to optimize campaigns for companies like yours. It would be nice to have an entire company like AdDaptive under your roof, but that isn’t very cost-effective for brands in other industries, so outsourcing those needs to AdDaptive is the smartest route to take.
Let’s recap.
Strategic partnerships allow the companies involved to focus on their strengths and pool their resources. If your company develops incredible creatives but may not be able to handle taking programmatic in-house, it would behoove you (and your bottom line) to partner with a vendor who has spent years perfecting their technology and gaining the experience to deliver higher quality impressions at scale for less money.
While it is best to know your brand as well as possible and do what is best for your company’s future, you need to consider the costs and risks of taking programmatic in-house, and think of the strengths you will be sacrificing or pulling away from your focus. To keep your brand engaged in the area where it excels, perhaps committing one or two members of your marketing team to liaising with a programmatic vendor is the best route to give you the best of both worlds. Hiring a media planner or media planning team to complement your marketing department will allow you to have a presence on your staff that is able to manage the relationship with the vendor and optimize your ads in conjunction with their accounts team. The vendor can be trusted to leverage their strengths – reliable data, transparency, expertise, focus, and cost-effectiveness – to support your strategy.
Ultimately, outsourcing programmatic advertising to an experienced ad tech vendor such as AdDaptive allows brands to reap the following benefits:
Greater scale
More developed expertise
Greater transparency with insights/reporting
More powerful technology
More reliable data
More strategic focus
Less time
More cost-effective
Higher return
Get started with AdDaptive today. Receive a free demo to experience the power of our proprietary technology and see firsthand how our superior solution can greatly benefit your brand.
Programmatic For B2B: Fitting A Square Into A Circle
August 23, 2018 |
Laura Bakopolus Goldstone
What if I told you programmatic wasn’t meant for B2B?
Hear me out.
Programmatic utilizes machines to make the ad-buying process more efficient and cost effective, since the technology can purchase the digital ads in real-time at scale while the humans, who previously had to buy and sell the ads manually, can now focus on strategy and optimization. It sounds ideal for any situation, but its targeting capabilities were originally meant for B2C. Programmatic emerged using web browsing behavior and cookies, which were fairly accurate indicators of what individuals were looking at online in their spare time. From this data, companies could discern what topics and items individuals were interested in, and, therefore, which they might want to spend their money on. B2C companies leveraged that power to reach these individuals at the right time, so that they were informed and ready to spend their money with said company.
For example, if you get home from work, relax on the couch with your laptop, and look up car reviews, there is a good chance you are in the market for a new car, or you know someone who is. If companies deliver digital advertisements to your screens that promote great prices or models of cars that interest you, your purchasing journey just got much easier (and the company deploying the ad just benefitted, too!).
But that is not how it works in the B2B world. Which website would you go to if you were exclusively in the B2B market? There are certainly websites that offer B2B resources, or you could go to the website of a company whose marketing efforts are solely B2B. But there isn’t really a digital marketplace exclusively for C-levels or IT decision makers in the B2B field where data can be collected on business accounts. Since there isn’t one website that can trace cookie data and browser behavior to B2B, it is very difficult for B2B companies to rely on those targeting efforts alone to reach the right people at the right companies.
The answer is to take programmatic beyond its basic B2C capabilities. We need to leverage more reliable data sets for B2B, so that publicly available data (and opted-in data) for decision makers at key business accounts is available for B2B companies to use in targeting their campaigns strategically.
This has not been readily available in the digital advertising world – until recently.
AdDaptive Intelligence has built its own proprietary technology that is capable of utilizing the strengths of B2C targeting and data, completing it with even more validated data and more narrow targeting solutions, and elevating it to apply to the B2B world. Suddenly, companies don’t have to employ the “spray and pray” approach; instead, they can choose the individual at each business that they want to target based on who would be most beneficial to their business.
Whether we are ready for it or not, the lines between B2B and B2C marketing approaches are growing increasingly blurred as strategies overlap. Of course the two differ in terms of who their direct clients are, but even in that sense, there is some murkiness, since programmatic in the B2B sense can target individual customers at business accounts. It’s still technically B2B because the individual is at a business, and engaging the business account is the goal, but the most powerful technology out there can pinpoint the specific customer at that company account for whom it is most important to view a specific ad. Plus, people-based marketing delivers more favorable results. If you concentrate on the customer-buying journey, and you relate to the individuals with whom you aim to engage, you will be able to reach your target customer in a more strategic and effective manner – whether you are working at a B2B or B2C company. And in both cases, brand loyalty matters. B2C marketers tend to revel in the idea that they have more fun communicating directly with their customers, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Even though B2B companies are ultimately looking to form a relationship with a company, the individuals at that company are the ones who make the decisions about the relationship. At the end of the day, the customer is a person in both B2B and B2C sectors.
Programmatic is no different. Ads can be directed towards businesses or customers, but regardless of the intended path, the end user is a person: An individual is going to see the ad and either advocate for it, purchase it, or disregard it. If an individual sees value in the ad, he will take action, whether for himself (B2C) or his company (B2B). If a technology is strong enough to dig through the layers of business data to reach the individual at each company that will deliver the most effective results for each digital ad campaign, programmatic can be the key to – and the future of – B2B digital advertising.
Only a few players in the field are capable of deploying such a powerful solution, one of which is AdDaptive Intelligence. AdDpative’s trailblazing technology filters through myriad data points and targets the individual influencers at key business accounts for each client. The technology can do so at scale in real-time, and can react to pricing and inventory changes accordingly. The ad buying is being done digitally and instantaneously through machine learning, while the workers in the office are setting up and managing the campaigns strategically in order to deliver the best results for their clients. In other words, programmatic advertising is finding a new home in the B2B marketplace, and it’s delivering a great deal of value to companies with business prospects. Key technology and ABM providers like AdDaptive are crucial in furthering the advancement of this game-changing approach and providing valuable solutions to B2B marketers.
Creative uses of technology can lead to sustaining innovations that incrementally improve existing products or services in a manner that is vastly different from what was previously thought possible. Sometimes, a technology comes along and revolutionizes the way business is done. Programmatic is that technology. Several years ago, programmatic B2B digital advertising was a mere dream, and now it is a reality. For some, it is a necessity to achieve competitive advantage. Who knows what the ad tech landscape will look like in just a few more years? The only certainty is that companies like AdDaptive will be leading the charge, bringing us new capabilities we never knew we needed.
