The Programmatic Landscape

We came over Luma’s infographic ”Display LUMAscape”,  and thought it illustrates very well how there are a lot of different players involved in today's programmatic process of trading display advertising between marketers and publishers.

Picture source: Terence Kawaja, http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/display-ad-tech-lumascape/

We think this is a good starting point to analyse some of the issues that have been introduced when the relation between marketers, media agencies and publishers have developed from “direct buying” into pragmatic buying through various ad exchanges.

As more and more of the display marketing are traded through various markets and exchanges platforms, is it more difficult than ever for marketers to have control of where their banners are shown. The Breithart Appnexus controversy clearly illustrates this problem and is probably just another example of display advertising showed on websites where advertisers don’t want it to be showed.

The gap between the buyer/marketer and the publisher has grown a lot wider. This gap has been filled up with players that deliver technology and tools that let publishers offer their inventory to anyone on the web, and marketers to track consumers around the web across sites, apps and other digital channels. But many of these technology enablers demands a cut of the ad spend before it ends up in the publisher’s pockets. Possible implications for traditional publishers like newspapers can be smaller revenues, fewer journalists and quality of the content. How this will affect advertisers in the long term are yet to be seen.

Screenshot: http://edition.cnn.com/

And what about the people who are exposed to these ads? Do they really know where and what kind of digital traces they leave when they browse the web, social media and apps on their mobile phones? And do they really like to be retargeted around the web? And what do accepting cookies in order to continue browsing actually mean?

Programmatic is here to stay and its more important than ever that both marketers, middle man’s, publisher and consumers understands the issues that comes with this.

Amanda Holst and Ingvild Larsen

Retargeting advertisement: a change in people's consumption

For years now, Internet has revealed to be an excellent distribution channel for companies to sell their products or services, the nowadays-famous “e-commerce”. More and more marketplaces, and commercial websites have been created and companies have found new ways to attract people to buy, in digital marketing words: to realize a conversion; this by collecting data on people online behavior. They use “cookies” to know how consumers process during their online shopping and their global browsing behavior on Internet: this is what we call the user path. With the services of companies like Criteo or even Facebook, advertisers and publishers exploit the retargeting advertisement to propose the right online advertisement to the right person, at the right moment, in order to increase the conversion rate.

The retargeting advertisement works with the user own agreement to have cookies collected during their online navigation. This marketing tool generates data, which highlights some typical behaviors from the Internet users:

• ·       “70% of users who are retargeted with display ads are more likely to convert/buy on your website.
• ·       Nearly 3/5 US online buyers said they notice ads for products they looked up on other websites.
• ·       Retargeting can lead to a 147% higher conversion rate over time in certain industries
• ·     In one comScore study, retargeted ads leds to a +1046% increase in branded search, a sign of heightened brand awareness and recall, and a +726% increase in the site visitation after four weeks of retargeted ad exposure
• ·       With retargeting, there is a +26% of users who return and complete the checkout process.”

First of all, companies cannot target all online consumers; in fact, they have to proceed by what we call a “cookie pool” to get a first segmentation of the population they target. Thanks to this cookie pool companies can find consumers who are engaged and have developed well-defined preferences of what they like and how they navigate online. Companies need this segmentation to be able to adapt their advertisement message as precisely as possible; they aim to make potential customers buying the product, as fast as they would buy if they were in a physical store. (Scheme below)

 

The retargeting advertisement is mostly based on computer technology, but with the emergence of mobile marketing, mobile apps or tablets, companies use cross-device retargeting. This technique enables the company to propose tailored advertisement to a consumer through over every connected screen he or she uses. Companies also send email ads to consumers, which is a marketing tool very common for retargeting advertisement, but less subtle than on a banner on Facebook for example, and more intrusive. Another way of retargeting consumers, mastered by Google is the search retargeting, Google Adwords illustrate perfectly it; companies pay to appear on the top of the first search page on Google, and therefore, if two individuals type in the same words on the Google search engine, they will have different content proposed to them, based on the data gathered on their online behavior.

However, when doing retargeting, some good practices are needed. First, companies are advised to be quality orientated rather than favor the quantity of ads they display. Secondly, using cross-device retargeting is crucial not to lose the consumer if he changes of device. The example of Facebook NewsFeed and Right Hand Banners show that the consumer is now less attentive to the right banner than a newsfeed ad. Indeed the newsfeed ad appears when the potential consumer puts his attention reading his friends and fan pages’ news.

Retargeting has not yet reached its full potential. In fact, “46% of search engine marketing professionals believe retargeting is the most underused online marketing technology”. However, due to excessive quantity of online advertisement displayed to the consumer, more and more internet users equipped themselves with adblockers when browsing, which constitutes a major threat to online advertisement.

Sources:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140416123459-646807-5-mistakes-you-are-making-with-retargeting

http://digitalmarketing-glossary.com/What-is-Cookie-pool-definition

https://yourescapefrom9to5.com/retargeting-ad-statistics-infographic

http://www.webmarketing-com.com/2015/02/04/35227-tout-savoir-sur-le-retargeting

http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/2011.12_Lambrecht_Tucker_When%20Does%20Retargeting%20Work_311.pdf