Digital media decision making is constantly evolving, and with demand-side platforms, digital agencies have set up lightning-fast environments for buying and selling a variety of online ad impressions, similar to the computerized stock trading desks used by quantitative traders.
DSPs are remaking the media landscape and increasingly blurring the boundaries between digital and traditional advertising. These new data-fueled media buying approaches will affect brand-related advertising and media planning and buying in the future and can also bring more advertising money to digital.
A lot of people associate DSPs with pure real-time or impression-level buying, but it’s much more than that. DSPs are a means by which agencies, holding companies, and all forms of buyers can plan and purchase media, whether on a real-time or guaranteed basis. You can hyper-target to your audience, surgically acquire an audience, or drive brand metrics — such as lift — on a much more tactical level than in the traditional forms of buying.
There’s a call for greater transparency and analytics in digital. Advertisers say, “Great, my campaign is performing. Why? Is it doing better on video versus display? On mobile as opposed to video? How is search informing display? How is display informing search?” What they really want to see is a holistic view. You’ve got to look at all of your channels because the ultimate goal is, for most advertisers, to build awareness at top of funnel and then drive them to convert. There are ways in which people quantify brands today in traditional channels, and you can quantify them in the same ways online using tools like Knowledge Networks Dimestore.
Clients are also looking for easier ways to buy audiences across channels – display, video, mobile, social and search. They want to target the 18- to 34-year-old male who’s in the market for a Ford, without worrying about exactly which web sites he is specifically on, which brings me to contextual.
The last thing is channel buying, which is becoming a big thing. Clients want to buy just the financial channel, or just the automotive channel. This is all really contextual; Ford wants to be where there is content about cars; it could be Ford-specific content, or it could be about cars in general.
Media buying is moving toward this on-demand model, but it relies on comprehensive data about how every channel works to justify the move for advertisers. Because DSPs and agency trading desks are rapid-fire environments where ads are bought and sold on a per-impression basis, that data increasingly needs to be delivered in real time.
There are many ways to measure brand impact online, but right now, surveys are the most relevant. The challenge of surveys is being able to achieve a sufficient number of completions to allow technology to start drawing inferences. You need high survey completion rates, or else you never achieve significant scale. If you don’t get large enough samples, how do you optimize? Right now agencies and buyers need data gathering partners that make survey completion easy, while providing the data back to them in a timely manner that lets them change their campaign on the fly, when necessary. We use KN Dimestore because it makes it a lot easier for surveys to be completed. We took one look at the product, and it just was a no-brainer because of the ease of use and rapid response. It’s the next evolution of how you capture market metrics. We think it is one of the pieces to bring more brand dollars online.
A clearer understanding about how you spend that marketing dollar every day across the funnel — the ability to connect the dots — is one of the pieces will drive more brand dollars online.
Moving forward, the true definition of a DSP encompasses everything from campaign IO management all the way through the buying process – creative optimization, analytics and clearinghouse services for the agency and advertiser. Whether accomplished via a build or a buy partnership model, the DSP becomes the one stop for media buyers.
I think in no uncertain terms it’s pretty clear that clients want to buy this way. And again it’s not just real-time bidding. The days of the faxed or emailed or paper IO will move behind us. There’s no reason that you couldn’t then log into a DSP dashboard and execute your guaranteed buys, plus set up things like CPM floors, tiered buying based on levels of transparency, sponsorships and homepage takeovers. I do think the DSP have become the digital media hub of the future. But getting advertisers to buy into DSPs means you have to show them they can get what they want – a holistic view, audiences, and contextual buying. But to justify that kind of buying, you need the necessary data to show how it works.
Anthony Katsur is the GM of MediaMath.
Digital media decision making is constantly evolving, and with demand-side platforms, digital agencies have set up lightning-fast environments for buying and selling a variety of online ad impressions, similar to the computerized stock trading desks used by quantitative traders.
DSPs are remaking the media landscape and increasingly blurring the boundaries between digital and traditional advertising. These new data-fueled media buying approaches will affect brand-related advertising and media planning and buying in the future and can also bring more advertising money to digital.