Last year, €878.4 million was spent on digital advertising in Spain. That’s a 21% share of the overall advertising spend, second only to TV. This year, it’s expected to rise again and could reach €1 billion by the end of 2014! Two factors are driving this growth, more sophisticated programmatic buying and the proliferation of video. According to global research specialist IHS, programmatic video ad buying across the UK, Spain, Germany, France and Italy is growing at an average of 77% per year and could be worth a combined €627 million by 2017.
This is cause for a fiesta in Spain. Whilst the advertising sector as a whole is struggling to pull itself out of recession, Spanish advertisers are turning their attention to programmatic campaigns that are strong on video and low on cost.
Video is an engaging medium but it requires the right viewer experience to be effective. For instance, a great TV ad doesn’t always translate well online. What we need in Spain now is to refocus on effective measurement and optimised video techniques so that true performance advertising can replace low cost solutions.
By this I mean, truly understanding what’s driving the success of a campaign, especially with higher-funnel video ads. Without a click-to count, it can be difficult for Spanish advertisers to understand how much video efforts are contributing to their overall goal.
The good news is that there are numerous algorithmic attribution solutions available that allocate weight to each impression and track events through pixels. The output explains which impressions have the most influence over the conversion event so that adjustments can be made to the overall mix. This is another opportunity to optimise, enabling the reallocation of spend to media that has been positively identified as an ROI driver.
We’re doing our bit to drive this mindset in the Spanish market. Our New Marketing Institute (NMI) was set up to educate, empower and engage a new generation of global marketing professionals with the necessary knowledge along with TerminalOne training through our industry-wide certification program. We’re also sending out the message that one of the biggest benefits of programmatic marketing is the immediacy of the insights you can glean about your customers and potential customers and the ability to use this data effectively in real-time.
Spanish advertisers are particularly interested in demographic and geographical data and in the past year, we’ve seen some actually double their spend in order to grow their data stock in this area.
While it’s critical to have someone ready at a moment’s notice to leverage these insights in order to optimise a media campaign, having direct access to these insights on the brand side will also help them to better hone offline or other non-media based marketing strategies as well.
We’re also encouraging Spanish brands to push for total transparency into their media campaigns for a range of reasons – from understanding campaign budgeting to being able to activate data insights across the entire organisation.
For some, this may mean bringing the technology platform in-house and managing it entirely on their own. For others, it means having direct access to the technology, but continuing to rely on an agency or other intermediary who has the true programmatic media buying expertise to pull the levers.