If you’ve read part one of our interview with Winterberry’s Managing Director Jonathan Margulies, you’ll know that we’ve been privy to probing him for additional insights around the group’s recent white paper, Programmatic Everywhere: Data, Technology and the Future of Audience Engagement, which MediaMath has sponsored. In this second portion of the interview, Margulies discusses the many applications for programmatic technology. You’ll notice that he is particularly passionate about what he considers the “meta use case” for programmatic.
Let’s talk about media buying. What’s the adoption rate like, and how fast is it growing?
There’s no shortage of estimates out there that will put an actual dollar value on the media spend associated with practices like RTB, but we were more concerned with the pervasiveness of programmatic as a center of the marketing and media strategy in large enterprises. To that end, 85 percent of the advertisers we interviewed are buying media programmatically today—and that’s going to rise to over 90 percent over the next two years.
You’ve referenced automation of back-end processes as the “meta use case” for programmatic. What do you mean by that? What is adoption of that like today?
This was, candidly, a topic that inspired a lot of internal debate as we were working through our final conclusions. In one sense, after all, process automation is programmatic; in another sense, it’s possible to automate all sorts of back-end workflows without actually deploying programs that are audience-centered, rules-driven and focused on activating a business strategy. Subtle differences, yes, but ultimately there’s enough daylight between the two interpretations for us to consider them wholly distinct.
That said, what we call “back-end marketing process automation”—calling for the development of workflows that address business needs, and the utilization of tools that can activate those workflows rapidly and at scale—is very much at the heart of the programmatic enterprise. And for many marketers, simply achieving some measure of automation represents a substantial leap from the business-as-usual approaches they’ve depended on for years. (Think, for example, of all the ad operations functions that are dependent on Excel spreadsheets, faxes, manual signoffs and the like.) Obviously, though, the most impactful programmatic strategies are going to build upon an automation foundation to do much more. Automation, then, can happen independently of the programmatic approach. But can you be programmatic without having that critical element in place? I don’t think so. That’s one of the many reasons why we see many parallels between what’s happening in the worlds of “programmatic media,” “marketing automation” and enterprise technology, in general. Ultimately, they’re all working toward addressing very similar organizational needs.
Can advertisers leverage programmatic to optimize their content strategies?
They certainly can and there’s a tremendous amount of enthusiasm out there about the potential to leverage programmatic tools in support of use cases that have little or nothing to do with paid advertising. At the end of the day, after all, the marketer is looking to elevate the frequency and substance of their dialogue with the customer, the prospect, the casual visitor just strolling by. We know that rich data is a valuable input to that effort. And increasingly, we’re coming to understand that content—whether delivered in a paid banner ad, on a landing page, via an affiliate partner or in the context of a completely independent editorial property—is ultimately the means by which we activate the insight that data provides. Long term, I really believe that “programmatic content” is going to represent an opportunity for practitioners to carve out a distinct identity in a crowded, chaotic media landscape. And for the most capable among them: a defensible competitive advantage.
The third and final segment of our interview with Margulies will be posted shortly. Meanwhile, download Programmatic Everywhere: Data, Technology and the Future of Audience Engagement here.