Inspire Creativity with Programmatic Technology
How can programmatic technology help me shape my advertising campaign?
How do I target different audiences using programmatic technology?
How do I come up with data-driven creative concepts and strategies?
Imagine an airline company wants to get sports fans talking about their brand during an international soccer tournament.
They know that fans will check sports websites throughout the game. So, they decide to create online ads that will react to what’s currently going on in the game, with messaging intended for specific groups of fans.
But which ads will get soccer fans really engaged and excited?
Imagine it’s the quarterfinals, Canada v. Mexico. Canada just scored a goal.
Programmatic technology uses data and algorithms to plan, buy, and optimize ads to help deliver the right messages to the right people at the right times.
Programmatic ads look like any ad you get on your computer or mobile phone. But behind the scenes, data and customer behaviors decide which ads should be seen, and by which audiences.
This allows you to serve ads à la carte to different groups of people, which means your advertising can be more innovative and creative.
Let’s see how programmatic technology helped MINI, an auto brand known for cars that are tailored to fit anyone, run a fun and creative campaign.
MINI wanted to promote 7 car models to audiences with different needs. To do this, they created a collection of ads that were broken down by elements like images, headlines, calls to actions (CTAs), and more.
By knowing their target audiences and monitoring site activity (like what model someone looked at while on the site), MINI could use programmatic technology to more effectively tailor ads for specific people.
How did programmatic technology help MINI?
CONVERSIONS
MINI’s conversions increased by 60%.
SPEND
MINI’s cost for acquiring new users fell by 35%.
ACCURACY
MINI reduced the number of ad placements they created by 94%.
LISTEN UP
Creating a programmatic campaign requires a lot of planning, analyzing, and concepting.
To help you come up with and run a successful campaign, work with your creative and media agencies.
Start by writing a creative brief. Make sure you and your agencies know your audience, what makes them tick, and how this can affect your messaging.
Do this by segmenting your audience into categories according to age, gender, and interests. To segment audiences, think like a detective, deducing clues from data left by people, online and offline.
To track and study customer behavior on your website, use tools like Crazy Egg or Google Analytics to tag pages and links. Also, use Google Trends to gain insights about your audience, like what they’re searching for online.
Once you have insights about what your audience cares about and how they behave, use a programmatic buying tool like DoubleClick Bid Manager or Google Display Network to tie your creative messages to those insights.
The tool will give you access to aggregated data about viewers of ads, such as their location, device type, weather, demographics, and more.
After you’ve gathered all this data, see what common trends and themes arise. Bundling these trends will help you create target customer profiles, like 25-30 year-old soccer-loving Canadian females.
Now it’s time to get creative. Work with your agencies to come up with ads you can tailor to each audience in real-time, AKA dynamic ads.
Making dynamic ads means creating different copy, imagery, and CTAs for different scenarios. To do this, look at the data you’ve gathered. Select a couple of factors only, like weather or demographics, to avoid getting mixed signals.
For example, if the airline customer in Toronto and another in Oaxaca looked for flights online, they both might see ads showing the same visuals, but each ad would have a different destination, airport location, language, and CTA.
Because these ads will be seen on different devices, make sure the ads are optimized for different screens and capabilities. Also, consider taking advantage of device features like GPS, tilt, swiping, and accelerometer.
To make sense of all these factors, create a logic map: This is basically an “if this, then that” list that shows where your ads go, during what situation, and to what audience.
TIP
Before launching your programmatic campaign, do a low-budget trial run to make sure everything is working properly.
Once the system is up and running, increase the amount you spend each day until you reach your chosen budget.
After your programmatic campaign is in full swing, make sure your ads are getting to the right people and helping you reach your goals.
Observe how audiences are interacting with your ads. Do some audience segments respond better to different CTAs and features?
Gather these insights by capturing data from people’s interactions, like site visits and time spent on your site, ad views, and conversions (whether the display ad led to a sale).
Capturing interactions helps you do remarketing. It uses data (or “cookies”) to record a person’s visit to your site and their actions on it. This lets you advertise your brand or products to that person as they browse other sites.
However, make sure you’re not showing the ad to the same person too often, or they might feel like they’re being bombarded.
Also, by knowing what ads people have seen and interacted with, you can show them sequential ads that start telling a story. This can help build brand awareness and affinity.
DO THIS NOW
Now that you’ve seen how programmatic technology can help tailor ads to specific audiences in real-time, make a list of factors that could inspire ads for your campaign.
If you’re participating in the course, go to the next section to access your self assessment.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Programmatic technology allows you to create ads that react to real-time events and push them to different, specific audiences.
To better target different customers, segment your audience according to their gender, and interests.
Capturing data from people's interactions with your ads helps you see whether they're effective.