Omnichannel Programmatic is The Way Ahead in 2019

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When it comes to purpose-driven brands, nothing beats good advertising that not only engages but leaves a lasting impact.

One of the most recent examples of this is Nike’s Dream Crazy campaign featuring NFL backer Colin Kaepernick.

It is a proven fact that advertising campaigns need to drive home messages that brands aspire to. Why else would Pepsi’s 2017 ad featuring Kendall Jenner receive backlash, while the Nike campaign, worked? It’s because s 58 per cent of Millennials dislike advertising, while 84 per cent don’t trust them. In this scenario, what works for brands is a purpose and a purpose-driven ad campaign. And, it’s easier to drive this through omnichannel programmatic.

Wondering what is omnichannel programmatic?

Forrester defines it as ‘the practice of digitally sequencing advertising across channels, which is connected, relevant, and consistent with the customer’s stage in their life cycle.’

The global study of 2,000 B2B buyers and sellers conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Accenture Interactive and SAP hybris found that business buyers’ expectations for personalisation regardless of channel, device, or stage in the journey are rapidly evolving. This evolution is influenced by their experiences as consumers. More than half of buyers said that they would like suppliers to offer personalised recommendations across interactions, a truly seamless omnichannel experience.

Also Read: Omnichannel Marketing Can Help Boost Your Marketing Campaign

Why Do Marketers Need to Focus on Omnichannel Programmatic?

Going back to the example of Nike’s ad campaign, this time their #RiskEverything campaign during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. Nike partnered with Google to deliver a truly omnichannel experience to football fans across the globe. Forbes reported that the campaign generated more than 6 billion campaign impressions in 35 countries covering television, cinema, digital/mobile, gaming, print, and outdoor, with a jaw-dropping 372 million views combined. The #askzlatan interactive campaign, which was part of the bigger campaign, featured an animated persona of footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovich who responded to consumer questions in short personalised films, also received over 10.5 million digital views.

Going programmatic for their omnichannel campaign will help marketers to overcome the following challenges:

1. Creating connected brand experience across channels: Bridging the gap between customer interaction and their persona for better customer experience is possible through adtech like DMPs, and onboarding of vendors, as they will help in identifying the customer across channels and throughout their buying journey.
2. Making inventory for ad delivery: Programmatic advertising had helped increase the adoption of APIs digitally across media to deliver an authentic brand experience to the right audience at the right moment. It also helps marketers understand and measure customer behaviour across their journey by connecting all the touch-points.
3. Real-time ad campaign delivery: DMPs and DSPs are critical in collecting data from various touch-points programmatically. This kind of data highlights not only the customer intent, but also their location, behaviour, content consumption, and history. Having this kind of data at hand, helps marketers to optimise interaction with customers, moving them towards the next stage of their journey, and ultimately towards a purchase.

Also Read: Identifying The Right Marketing Technology is a Challenge for CMOs

How to Start Your Omnichannel Programmatic Campaign?

A true omnichannel experience is difficult to achieve in the times of IoT and location-based ad targeting. Here’s how you can begin your journey:

• Start with multi-channel ad sequencing and analyse the results. Evaluate how experiences differ on various channels for a single customer against how they differ for different customers on the same channel. This will help you gauge what works on what channel and at which touch-point, thereby helping you understand the quality of your customer experience across channels.
• Use same ad technology on multiple channels. This will help you manage your ad campaign, adding to the efficiency of the campaign, offering better cross-channel optimisation, as well as control over the brand experience offered to target audience. Using different adtech across various channels will not only lead to confusion but also fragmented customer experience.
• Use attribution measurement techniques to identify and the impact of the ad campaign across different touch-points. This will help in understanding customer behaviour across different media, and help you provide better value at the customer’s preferred touch-point.

Top Three Channels to Drive Your Programmatic Campaigns

As opposed to popular belief, programmatic isn’t a channel in itself. IAB defines programmatic as a ‘general automated process of media buying and selling machine-to-machine’.

With smartphones, TVs, tablets, and computers abound, audiences are fragmented across these digital media, and programmatic enables marketers to leverage data and consolidate customer interactions across multiple channels.

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The top two channels that work well for a successful omnichannel programmatic ad campaign include:

Video Advertising:

One of the most effective channels, video advertising, is not only long-lasting in its impact, but also drives more conversions. Study says that 80% of people can remember a video ad they watched in the last 30 days. This lasting impact, when coupled with a strong brand story, holds the ability to turn your target audience into regular customers, with a brand experience they remember for a lifetime.

Native and Display Advertising

Native advertising helps marketers achieve their ultimate goal, i.e. create awareness, engage the customer, and lead them through a journey across the funnel. An effective native ad campaign can be built using compelling content that appeals to the target audience. On the other hand, display advertising paired with a good native ad campaign can create a good brand awareness campaign, driving performance, especially when used for retargeting. According to industry-wide research, display retargeting ads can drive higher conversion rates, sometimes increasing them up to 70 per cent.

Marketers need to leverage both of these channels at different stages of a customer’s journey to target audience, collect data, retarget, and achieve desired performance from the campaign.

Reiterating the point of this article, we’d like to say that with millions of indexed pages on the internet, and an equal number of apps available on various store, there’s a vast ad space waiting to be explored by marketers. And omnichannel programmatic is the answer to all of the marketers’ woes when it comes to advertising in the times of ad blockers, multiple devices, and social media.