Digital change cannot be avoided and is also increasingly affecting marketing. However, programmatic cannot simply be viewed as one of many channels in the marketing strategy or a corresponding tool can be installed, emphasizes Michael Plate, Head of Platforms Agency Networks DACH/Google Germany. Instead, agencies and companies need to completely rethink their approach and develop a marketing strategy geared towards programmatic. Plate explains why: "When I bought my new car, I didn't visit a single dealership - it was all done digitally. I made the decision and the purchase from my sofa and only picked up the new car from the dealer at the end." And this is increasingly the case in all areas today - both the information process and the purchase decision are made via digital channels. According to Plate, those who do not pick up their customers specifically where they can address them as an effective target group will quickly lose out at the decisive customer contact points. "Those who don't communicate programmatically will no longer be noticed," he warns. But what is the best way to organize programmatic media buying as the main value driver? Michael Plate presented his suggestions at the Swiss Online Marketing Fair. He talks to Werbewoche about the technical challenges, the need for agencies and companies to rethink their approach and how such an organization can work.
Werbewoche: What are the strategic and technical challenges for brands, premium publishers and agencies today?
Michael Plate: Programmatic is not just a demand-side platform (DSP, often shortened to bid manager) - the decisive factor is all the underlying data on which the media procurement decision is based. This data is collected and aggregated from all marketing channels. The enemy of meaningful, holistic processing of such data is the silo. Up to now, people have worked in silos - search, display and programmatic have been divided into channels. Behind this lies an organization in the agencies or on the part of the marketing decision-makers that serves the individual channels. However, work is usually not done with an overall view of the user, but in these very silos. This means that one team approaches you via the search channel, another via social, another with direct media buying and another team does programmatic. Nobody has a complete understanding. In programmatic, we now want to break down these silos by saying that we need to bring together all the information about the individual user. Every user is a "number" - but one with characteristics. If you bring these together, you can actually target the right advertising to the individual customer touchpoint.
What does this mean in concrete terms for agencies that want to work with programmatic?
First you have to create an organization that doesn't operate programmatic in silos. Then you have to get technology on board that can communicate with each other. Then you need the right audience definition - that's not so easy, but it's worth it. Then you have to assemble the creatives in such a way that you can combine them dynamically. You also have to ensure that the inventories can be controlled programmatically. And then you have to execute the whole thing, which means in repeated optimization steps.
Organize for Transformation - a long road ...
This means that the marketing-sales and technology disciplines need to work more closely together. The data silos - website data, campaign data, dealer data, i.e. first-party data and event data - must somehow be brought together. And these silos from a linear approach - such as following a media plan - must be broken down. Because such an approach is too inflexible and too slow. You need agile planning and work in smaller loops accordingly. This also means, for example, that the evaluated information can already be included as feedback in the continuation of the same campaign. What you build can already be improved on day 1 based on the ongoing data analysis. This also means that creatives will now work closely with data analysts.
What is the status of programmatic technology for the Swiss advertising market?
The average advertiser uses five different technology platforms to control and report on an advertising campaign. For example, search data cannot be used for programmatic campaigns, nor can on-site data; you have five different tools that cannot be linked to each other. At DoubleClick, we have therefore created a solution that brings all channels together. We started over five years ago and have now completed the "DoubleClick Digital Marketing Platform", which can do this.
What are the advantages of a programmatic consolidation of all data?
On the one hand, this brings process gains. Specifically, 33 percent fewer resources are required to deliver a campaign. In addition, there is no loss of data - there are no problems getting data from A to B. Because the whole thing is on one data platform, I have data homogeneity. At the performance level, we have seen in an initial study that click costs and click-per-view costs are falling, as are bounce rates. In general, all financial KPIs have improved significantly. On the one hand, we have the data from the current campaign. This means I always have immediate feedback on how the target group is reacting to my campaign and what the response is like. Analytics data from the website can then also be fed in. This data can all be merged. This can be further enriched with Google data and third-party data. These custom audiences are created in the aggregation, which then actually count. So you want to classify every user in a custom audience cluster. This way, you know what you are ultimately receptive to and in which usage situation, depending on how far the user's information and purchase decision process has progressed. For an Axe case in Brazil, for example, four specific target groups were defined. Each of these clusters was addressed with a different creative/content. There were 25,000 combinations of motifs in each of these clusters. Such a target group definition can then be used in a much more targeted way. For example, if I use the motif link to the weather, I can decide whether to stage the campaign at night or during the day, in snowfall or sunshine.
Won't this kind of planning be extremely complicated and the effort involved enormous?
Not necessarily, because I only have to define the components of the creatives and then the logic according to which these components have to be brought together. You simply build a campaign differently from the ground up. If the parts have been set up correctly, the bid manager can pull the right advertising material and control it for the individual user. To do this, however, the data manager, who develops an extensive and constantly refined knowledge of the audience, must exchange information with the creative. After all, the creative has to build the logic for their advertising media. However, this also means that I cannot build a static campaign, but have to design it dynamically.
Interview: Ursina Maurer
IN BRIEF
Michael Plate has been Head of Platforms Agency Networks DACH / Google Germany since 2012. He previously held various positions at Deutsche Telekom, most recently as Senior Executive VP Interactive Media from 2006 to 2012, before which he worked at Accenture for two years. Michael Plate studied business administration in Munich and has been in the industry since 1995. In his keynote speech at the Swiss Online Marketing Fair, Michael Plate showed how to best manage your own data and that of third parties and how to make it work for marketing success. He shed light on how brands can manage their data across various channels and how they can get rid of the obstacles of overarching segment-of-one media management (silos) in just a few steps. Instead of wasting time reporting discrepancies when managing campaigns, Plate advises how to create more impact with new data-driven tasks and processes.
