As programmatic continues to empower the digital media landscape and provide a more efficient pathway for software-driven inventory buying, marketers are benefiting from measurably richer audience insights and success metrics that allow them and their agencies to analyze marketing programs for dollar-smart results.

For many marketers, programmatic marketing has provided a depth of customer knowledge never before seen. Gary Milner, director of global digital marketing for Lenovo, the world’s largest PC vendor, is one such marketer.

Milner, who has lead the charge around programmatic at Lenovo globally over the past 12+ months, says one of the most meaningful ways to experience the value of programmatic in customer insights is through the ability to test messages and creative against different audiences to see which drives the most response and from whom.

“We have instituted testing into all of our campaigns using programmatic strategies which enables us to better segment our audiences, and hone in on messaging and creative assets that generate the greatest action at the most efficient cost,” said Milner.

From the use of its own CRM data to how the relationship with its agencies has grown, Lenovo is a great example of a brand that has really thought through how to organize around programmatic in order to leverage customer insights across online and offline strategies.

Q: What has been an eye opening experience with programmatic?

A: The biggest for me has been using programmatic to drive our brand consideration against the desired audience at lower cost. There is  no evidence that programmatic is less efficient at driving brand intent than premium properties. The overall impact is more lift per dollar spent with programmatic.

The other key impact is using data and audiences at the visitor level on Lenovo.com to build look a like models that can be  ingested into our buy platform. We have seen higher purchase intent by combining programmatic and site side data.

Finally it creates a beyond media behavior with PR even being able to participate to boost their PR video initiatives.

Q: How long have you been applying programmatic?

A: We’ve been engaging in programmatic for twelve months now, and we’re looking to scale up. Our strategies have evolved and our thinking has changed. We started in Europe, migrated to North America and now we’re in Australia. Longer term Asia is key.

Q: What are your campaign strategies in programmatic?

A: The strategies on the video and social side primarily focus on how to measure the brand lift and consideration against different properties. Looking at network versus premium versus programmatic, we’re engaging in creative testing, which needs to be planned at the start of the campaign. Programmatic is a great place to test a campaign pre-launch. We can test different creative, brand lift, and audience development strategies. We’re doing far more programmatic on the display side – mostly for e-commerce. We’re using a DMP, and we’re leveraging our CRM data to develop lookalike models.

Q: How are you leveraging agencies?  

A: Our global teams are in charge of the technology and strategies and our agencies help us execute and monitor the campaigns with an eye towards continuously improving performance.

Q: What percentage of your global marketing budget is going to digital?

A: At Lenovo, we don’t do a lot of TV. More than 50% of our marketing budget is digital globally. In the U.S., it’s primarily all digital. Incremental budgets are going to digital, not traditional.

Q: Do you have any advice for marketers on programmatic?

A: My best advice would be to structure how you’re going to test it. Every organization is organized differently. Marketers need to think about how to handle programmatic internally, as well as how to get their agencies involved for an end-to-end strategy.
The choices are trading desk, partially managed and self managed. The approach that a marketer adopts is driven by budgets, internal resource and overall  campaign goals. Regardless all brands should be thinking about premium vs programmatic media buying strategies.

With 85% of advertisers integrating programmatic into their media buying strategies, and 64% doing so aggressively, programmatic has made a tectonic shift from being the exception to the rule of our industry.

Marketers who aren’t yet part of this industry-wide movement know the advantages of harnessing and optimizing aggregated data intelligence. However, questions remain over how to use programmatic – not on a one-off campaign basis, but how to integrate it as part of a company’s DNA.

Imagine the marriage of data, media, ad serving, insights and analytics, and apps and services – the ultimate decisioning engine for driving successful marketing campaigns. Layer into that mix a tightly knit and educated internal team, a unified programmatic mindset across all business units, a strong agency partner, and a management structure that supports programmatic ideation – at scale – and you have the ability to get the most sophisticated media buying and data insights embedded into your marketing processes. Adopting and implementing new technology is only as effective as the individuals and teams within your organization that are trained in using it.

By adopting a solid programmatic framework that is woven throughout the entire organization, you have a smarter marketing machine with better tools to more accurately attune digital strategies and dynamic personalized campaigns that put the right message in front of the right consumer at the most opportune moment.

Here are some guidelines for layering programmatic into your organization:

• Break down silos and align your teams online and offline​

For synergy, best practices, efficiency, achieving common goals, utilizing a shared technology platform, enriching the analytics process, creating a customer-centric perspective, and operational cohesiveness.

• Get buy-in and support from the C-suite

​For better management oversight, stronger collaboration between teams, help in defining processes, unifying the technology, making more informed decisions, programmatic accuracy with every media and targeting decision, and a more unified organization.

• Find an ad tech partner for a best-of-breed platform ​

For a stronger programmatic core, an educational partner, more sophisticated analytics, customer retention and acquisition, high-level learning, strong media and data partners, internal programmatic knowledge and best practices, and transparent insights.

• Harness analytical brain power

For aligned goals, a combined knowledge base, employee empowerment, getting the most out of a technology platform, best use of data modeling, and a single view of the consumer.

• Test, evaluate, be flexible

Define and adopt new processes, strengthen insights and learnings, know what’s working and what’s not, measure the performance of technology, aim for maximum performance, set business goals, feature and functionality improvement, and monitor dips and peaks in performance.

Call it autonomy, synergy, or call it creating the groundwork for a programmatic-focused infrastructure. Regardless, team structure, aligned goals, and putting programmatic technology at the center of an organization’s universe is the only way to harness and utilize big data in a way that will render desired results every time.

Download this checklist of questions that will set you and your organization up for programmatic success.