Whilst I speak with clients about the advances of Programmatic, a question I’m often asked is what I believe to be the most important part to a programmatic marketing campaign. Inevitably my answer is often about the creative. The fundamentals of any marketing campaign are always the same and Programmatic campaigns are no different. Campaigns should always be lead by Creative, not the Media.
When we look at all the targeting options that we have at our disposal we see a lengthy list. Programmatic marketers are able to target by consumer behavior, by interests, by location, by attitudes, by life-stages, by relevance, within a context, by keyword, by demographics, within day parts, by frequency, by device type, and so on. That’s a lot of variables to target and as programmatic marketers we do a lot of optimising in these areas to achieve the best result possible for the campaign. Much is made of the abilities to find audiences, to target them, and to optimise toward them, but campaign optimisations should not end there. Once we’re sitting at the table with our consumer what conversations are we to have with the individual?
As we optimise our journey down the funnel to find that end consumer we would have learnt a lot about them along the way. The conversation we would have with that consumer at the point of brand exposure would be very different to when we find them, different to when we engage them, and different to when we transact with them. Creatives and their messaging intent therefore play a major part in the success of how we drive results in speaking with that end consumer.
Does it make any sense to utilise the advances of programmatic automation to find an individual, only to have a poorly tailored conversation with our consumer? Once we get to the end of that funnel, are you only having one conversation with the end consumer, who you’ve identified to be dozens of very different types of profiles? Why would you not speak with each individual differently? Programmatic automation can be used to optimise many hundreds of tailored conversations.
Far too often we get caught up in the technical aspects of programmatic automation being about the media, and how programmatic is able to pinpoint our target consumer in real time with great accuracy to find that one individual.
A most powerful tool in programmatic marketing is to use those same ‘media’ data signals that we gather along the way, to optimise tailored creatives, and to ensure that we are saying exactly what we need to be saying, to exactly the right individuals at the right time.
