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New Marketing Institute Brings Programmatic Education to Brands in India

February 6, 2019 — by MediaMath    

A key challenge in technology adoption is the lack of knowledge and strong understanding of its impact on a business. What is the new technology? Why should it be adopted? And how does the adoption impact one’s role? Training then becomes imperative to bridging this knowledge gap and clearing up some of the misconceptions marketers might have about a new technology.

In 2017, MediaMath’s educational arm, New Marketing Institute, ran an agency training roadshow attended by over 200 people across different media agencies in India. It aimed to educate and empower agencies to execute more efficient, successful marketing campaigns through programmatic.

For programmatic to fully reach its potential in India, MediaMath recognized that this education had to be extended to the advertisers themselves. In September of 2018, we decided to bring programmatic education to brand clients to help evolve these conversations—especially as some brands are reconfiguring their operating models to maximize their marketing investments while continuing to leverage their partners.

To ensure a successful training, we first needed to ensure the brand clients had a common foundation and language for understanding industry concepts. And it had to be practical and easy to comprehend to enable brands to better navigate the space and adopt programmatic successfully. The next challenge was to encourage the brand clients to start “thinking” programmatically, not just “buying” programmatically. Pranjal Desai, MediaMath’s Country Manager, India mentioned, “In my interactions with the brands, I often see the difficulty faced by the marketing teams to connect the dots in understanding how underlying factors like real-time data and real-time optimisation affect the campaign performance and how they should use this knowledge to plan and execute successful programmatic campaigns.” And more often than not, this is due to the lack of hands-on experience with running campaigns, which can make it difficult to fully grasp the impact of buying using platforms in real-time environments.

To address these challenges, NMI designed the Bid Masters Workshop, which aims to gamify programmatic buying in a way that helps brands see how real-time bids are placed, how different factors contribute to a win/loss of bid and how complex the decision-making becomes with increased variables at play. Our thinking was that through using a game, we could successfully get marketing teams to understand the trader’s mindset and hence start thinking programmatically.

During the training, NMI led a room of marketers from companies including IBM, Dell and leading e-commerce players like Myntra and BigBasket. Over 70 people from brands and agencies, with various roles including marketing managers, digital managers, campaign managers, analysts and content specialists, attended the training. The setup of Bid Masters really engaged the attendees—and the competitive spirit that captured the room didn’t hurt!

As shared by Manik Singla, Digital Marketing Deputy Director, Myntra, “Never before have I seen programmatic marketing being explained in such a simplistic and uncomplicated manner. I would advise all marketers who are eager to learn about programmatic marketing to attend this workshop with MediaMath.”

Attendee Anand Bhaskaran, Digital Marketing Manager, Big Basket, said  “The MediaMath NMI workshop is an excellent introduction to programmatic advertising. It covers all key aspects of the field, such as DSPs, SSPs, real-time bidding, DMPs and so on. The best part is the interactive group exercises, which clarify the concepts and make them quite unforgettable.”

We are hopeful that after attending the workshop the teams will be able to speak the same programmatic language, work more cohesively and produce better business outcomes through their programmatic marketing strategies.