If you keep abreast of industry news, you might be feeling lately like everyone and their dog is starting programmatic advertising and automating their ad-buying strategy.
That’s because everyone loves automation; it frees up time and eliminates repetitive manual processes. But automation with artificial intelligence, that optimizes ad spend, collects massive amounts of audience data, and has publishers scared it will cause downward pressure on ad pricing and hurt their revenues?! That my friends, is automation most marketers would be excited to bring home to meet their parents.
It’s the holy grail of audience targeting and it’s already being used to transact 82.5% of US digital display ad dollars. The general consensus is everyone in the mobile ad space will very soon be conducting business programmatically. But as with all topics we discuss here on Mobile Masterminds, we don’t care about the hype. We wanted to know what real mobile marketers actually think about transitioning to programmatic; why some are waiting, what they have learned through experimentation, and what they have planned for next year.
Below are some helpful insights into when to start a mobile programmatic advertising strategy, and some things other marketers have considered, regarding making the programmatic transition.
Not right now
Rocío Pérez
“We are currently making the conscious decision to hold off on investing in programmatic. At Liligo, we are focused on performance marketing, and we make strategic decisions based on the near future. Programmatic, although a great tool, needs time to optimize towards results. Many marketers don’t have enough time or large enough budgets to experiment with programmatic for several weeks with no guarantees. That being said, I am sure I will start running programmatic campaigns in the near future. It can be really powerful once you find the right sources and you are able to balance the CPI.” –Rocío Pérez, Acquisition Manager at Liligo.
Testing & experimenting
Lorenzo Rossi
“At Free2Move we treat programmatic as a test channel at the moment, and usually, the budget dedicated to testing is around 20% of the total. The performance is getting better each week but we are moving forward cautiously. If we continue to have good results we will be able to increase the budgets gradually. But we can’t afford to invest big chunks of our budget and wait for the performance to get better, because we have investors and need to justify results. Experimenting is the best option for us right now.”-Lorenzo Rossi, Head of Marketing at Free2Move.
Michael Jessen
“Roughly 20-25% of our budget goes to programmatic campaigns right now, but I expect that to grow soon as the results are getting better and the quality is very stable.”
– Michael Jessen, Mobile Marketing Manager at eCooltra
Etienne de Guébriant
“Programmatic is something we’re testing, I think industry-wise there’s still a lot to learn, but I’m positive programmatic will be very important in the coming years.”
-Etienne de Guébriant, UA Team Leader at Etermax.
Ready to go!
Pau Quevedo
“Programmatic is going to be a big focus for us in 2019. We have been running profitable programmatic desktop campaigns for some time now, but making the programmatic transition on mobile has been a challenge. During the past year we outsourced a small percentage of our budget to programmatic experimentation, but next year we have plans to bring our programmatic activities in-house. That will allow us to increase the budget, make better use of our 1st party data, and open up new possibilities that outsourcing simply can’t provide.
We have seen a lot of other companies also taking their programmatic activities in-house and using self-service DSPs. We know there will be challenges, for instance, building the right Mobile Technology Stack and finding the right talent is not easy. And because the industry is in large part focused on branding it can be hard to find the right tools for performance-based strategies, but we are up for the challenge.” –Pau Quevedo, Online Marketing Manager at Innogames.
