The automated marketing world is evolving at the speed of lightning yet marketers find themselves playing catch up. With so many opportunities for growth within the programmatic landscape, how do marketers ensure they’re not missing out? In a Direct Marketing article, Erich Wasserman, cofounder and chief revenue officer of MediaMath, suggests investing in software to help manage programmatic’s “sea of scalability.”
Read an excerpt of the article below:
Marketing would be so much easier to quantify and strategize if it just stopped moving so fast. Were programmatic advertising a person, age-wise it would be in the fourth grade. Yet it’s progressed so quickly in its short time on the planet that it’s on a fast track for grad school at MIT.
According to a recent state of the industry report from programmatic platform AdRoll, the percentage of the more than 1,000 marketing and ad executives polled who are retargeting on mobile jumped from 54% to 82% in 2015. But more amazing than that is the fact that a third of those surveyed for AdRoll by Qualtrics said their companies had yet to field a mobile app. A quarter of them hadn’t yet optimized their websites for mobile. It’s no wonder marketers have mixed feelings about programmatic.
“‘My advertising doesn’t work, the website sucks, and my salespeople don’t follow up on my leads.’ You hear this repeatedly across the B2B marketing landscape,” notes Peter Isaacson, CMO of Demandbase, an account-based marketing platform. “There is frustration, but there’s also an air of resignation that, ‘Yes, I know some of my ad dollars are wasted, I know they’re not reaching the audience I want, but how else am I supposed to reach a broad segment?’”
Erich Wasserman, cofounder and chief revenue officer of MediaMath, lays out the rocky path for B2C marketers.
“What programmatic has done is create a great deal of media liquidity in the marketplace,” he shares. “There are billions of opportunities on a monthly basis, and the sources of liquidity have multiplied — video and mobile and desktop, rich formats and social formats. The question is how to manage that enormous opportunity.”
Wasserman’s answer is software, and MediaMath and scores of other providers of cross-channel solutions and data management platforms are zealously tossing them out like life preservers to the marketers wading deeper into programmatic’s inviting sea of scalability. In 2013, just 7% of marketers spent more than half of their budgets on programmatic advertising. That percentage doubled in 2014 and, by last year, according to Qualtrics, one in five marketers were flowing the majority of their funds into programmatic.
Much of that increased investment is being spent on mobile, literally a moving target across both time and location. One solution finding favor is Go2mobi, which promises marketers a way to deliver programmatic ads depending on the time of day, the weather, and the recipient’s proximity to home and work. Like many cross-channel solutions seeking to track people’s daily migration from screen to screen, it uses probabilistic matching to follow desktop IDs to mobile. Also like most solutions fighting to gain traction in a whirlwind of change, it’s a work in progress.
“There’s still not a perfect closed-loop system for tying an actual cash register ring to another touchpoint, like when [customers] make a phone call. It depends on how sophisticated the marketer is,” explains Go2mobi president and cofounder Tom Desaulniers. “Some are really ahead of others and some are totally flat-footed. There’s a huge opportunity for companies in our space.”
Solutions providers, therefore, are spreading the table with a banquet of options allowing marketers of all sizes and capabilities to tuck into programmatic campaigns that are more targeted and efficient.
For the full Direct Marketing article, click here.