Programmatic Branding: Driving Upper-Funnel Engagement

While programmatic technology has historically been used for direct response and acquisition marketing, marketers are increasingly applying programmatic technology to digital brand awareness campaigns.  In a paper, produced by Econsultancy, more than 100 senior-level marketers in the UK and the US were surveyed about their use of programmatic for brand awareness initiatives. The marketers cited “increased efficiency,” “reduced overall advertising costs,” “the ability to optimize in real-time,” and “the opportunity to leverage first-party data” as the top benefits of programmatic branding. Other findings from the paper include:

• Creative leads the way: Branding is, above all, about telling great stories and creating the ‘attention, interest and desire’ in the upper funnel. That work is more measurable than ever, but you still can’t ‘plug into’ the way a great ad makes a consumer feel. What programmatic data can offer are deep insights into which audience segments responded best to which creatives, how time of data and other factors impacted results and how content adjacency drove (or decreased) impact.

• Real-time insight into brand equity: The transition to the programmatic environment for the brand marketers offers a real-time understanding of consumer behavior and sentiment.

• Branding awareness through programmatic measurement: Marketers and agencies find platform consolidation a huge benefit when it comes to aligning success metrics, and being able to develop a shared framework for measurement.

• Programmatic video: Progressive marketers are starting to leverage new measurement techniques to justify mass reach campaigns online.

• Branding insight through programmatic measurement: Marketers and agencies find platform consolidation a huge benefit when it comes to aligning success metrics, and being able to develop a shared framework for measurement.

• Multi-touch attribution is key to programmatic branding: Multi-touch attribution is helping CPG (consumer packaged goods) marketers shift budgets from television and print into online, where reach is less expensive. Marketers like Kellogg’s have been aggressively pushing the boundaries of this notion, and seeing success in the grocery store by applying less budget to overall branding – yet achieving ever higher levels of exposure, through the elimination of waste by more precise targeting.

• The role of data in programmatic branding: Data management is playing a role in being able to capture activity at the user level, and model the path to purchase against the paid, owned and earned measurable media that the user encountered.