Diana Dalsgaard, Director of Platform Solutions EMEA at MediaMath, was recently interviewed by Swedish publication, Dagens Media. Below is an English translation of the original article.
Programmatic trading continues to expand throughout the Nordics. But despite its rapid growth, marketers frequently view the technology as complex and intimidating.
Representing 50% of total spend last year, Sweden is the largest user of programmatic technology within the Nordics and CEE regions. While the programmatic market is relatively mature, and is diversifying from traditional open exchange models and RTB into private marketplaces and premium programmatic, Nordic marketers are struggling to keep pace with the influx of industry terminology and the new solutions available. Education followed by continuous learning is needed throughout the programmatic ecosystem to increase adoption of marketing technologies and ensure that they are delivering optimum results.
So how can marketers ensure they are maximising the potential of programmatic?
Adopt a customer-centric approach
Programmatic is more than the technology behind automated media trading – it enables marketers to manage the increasingly fragmented customer journey. To benefit fully from programmatic, Nordic marketers need to adopt a customer-centric approach. The modern consumer expects brands to identify and remember them across all channels and devices – recalling their previous purchases and anticipating future needs by providing targeted recommendations and relevant offers. Marketers can achieve this by leveraging the first and third-party data they have available to deliver cohesive, personalised messaging across all channels throughout the consumer lifecycle.
Align programmatic KPIs with business goals
Marketing departments are under increasing pressure to demonstrate ROI and other business performance metrics. Programmatic makes marketers more accountable for bottom-line results as the campaign KPIs that programmatic marketing operating systems optimise to are measurable against key business goals. These goals aren’t always directly financial – they may be promoting loyalty and retention throughout the customer lifecycle, or increasing brand awareness or engagement – but they must be measurable. Programmatic should become a central part of the business culture around which the marketing strategy is built.
Promote programmatic understanding
Increased education around programmatic and the benefits it can deliver encourages openness to adoption within an organisation. It is largely the responsibility of technology providers to educate, engage, and empower digital marketers by promoting a clearer understanding of the technology and sharing their knowledge and expertise. Improving the industry’s knowledge of programmatic will ensure marketers are aware of its benefits, which include:
• Efficiency: Programmatic provides a highly efficient way for marketers to reach consumers individually and at scale, cherry-picking consumers across channels and devices in an individualised, sequenced way. The 720 weekly media-buying decisions that one full-time employee could traditionally make can be increased to 840 billion decisions using a programmatic marketing operating system.
• Reach: Programmatic allows marketers to adopt a truly omnichannel marketing approach, with access to digital media inventory as diverse as mobile, video, search, display, social, print and connected TV. It also enables marketers to expand their reach by identifying and targeting look-alike audiences.
• Insight: Today’s marketers have access to more data than ever before, allowing in-depth analysis to enable audience segmentation and contextual targeting. With a programmatic marketing operating system, marketers can activate consumer insight to better understand their consumers, their path to purchase, and the messaging that is most relevant to them.
Understanding these benefits will advance the entire ecosystem, and strengthen the relationships between marketers, their media buying or trading organisations, and technology providers themselves. Connection and collaboration between these three parties will ultimately allow the industry as a whole to work towards two common goals – driving marketing ROI and advancing digital innovation.
The tide in the Nordics has already turned towards programmatic and is rising fast. Marketers who want to do more than simply stay afloat need to make programmatic central to their digital strategies and a key part of their business culture.