Solving the PROGRAMMATIC PUZZLE.

How to use data and technology to simplify, clarify, and maximize your ad campaigns.

2016

22016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

Let’s be honest. Programmatic buying is complicated. With so many pieces of data and technology involved, running a programmatic campaign can feel like putting together a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Of a blue sky. On a cloudless day.

As TV host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel quipped recently during one of his shows, programmatic is “the gluten of advertising.”1 Marketers know it’s cool, and they’re certain it’s something they should be doing. But many, even those already doing it,

don’t necessarily understand all the perplexing technology behind the trend or how to harness their audience data to maximize efficiency.

In fact, 41 percent of marketers admit that they’re either unaware or lack an understanding of programmatic ad buying , according to Forrester.2 Yet, despite this knowledge gap, an Econsultancy report from 2015 suggests marketers are still plunging in—and expect to increase their programmatic ad spend by an average of 37 percent by 2017.3

Fortunately, programmatic isn’t an unsolvable puzzle.

Programmatic success still relies on the three traditional pillars of advertising: the right audience, the right channel, and the right message. And while data and technology are core to programmatic buying , you don’t necessarily need a huge arsenal of tools to piece it all together.

In fact, programmatic buying can be a transparent, simple, and efficient way to reach your audience if you can fit these three advertising pieces (right customer, right channel, and right message) together effectively—and it’s not as hard to do as it may seem.

32016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

Many people confuse programmatic with buying ads through computer-run auctions known as real-time bidding (RTB), but that’s just one way to buy ads programmatically. You can bid for an ad the same way you would bid for a hotel room on Priceline (the RTB method), but you can also buy ads directly, the same way you would book your hotel room on Expedia. In programmatic, this is called private exchange—one publisher, but many advertisers.

You can even buy top-tier inventory, such as an ad on a high-end digital publication like Vanity Fair, through a guaranteed direct programmatic purchase. Under these guaranteed direct deals, a publisher may negotiate a fixed price for a guaranteed number of impressions through the ad exchange platform.

But however you buy your ads, the underlying process and goals will be the same—to improve the efficiency of your digital ad campaigns through data-driven, automated decision-making. To help you achieve your goals, we’ve outlined some of the most common challenges companies face when it comes to programmatic advertising and how to solve them.

At its most basic, programmatic simply means automated. It refers to any ad buy—social, search, display, even TV, video, and mobile—that is bought and sold through machines. Its value lies in the efficiency of the process—no more filling out insertion orders or emailing media planners—and in its ability to use data to conduct and hone digital campaigns across channels and devices.

Start with the CORNERS.

42016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

CHALLENGE SOLUTIONThe picture of your audience data is incomplete.

The first piece in the programmatic puzzle is finding your target audience. In the past, marketers defined audiences in broad swaths, such as football fans or parents with infants. Those days are gone. Thanks to new technologies and big data, marketers can segment and refine their audiences down to previously unimagined exactitude—like who wears red nail polish, shops at Target, and drives a red Volkswagen (if you’re looking for people who love red).

The combinations and pieces of data are infinite. You can fit them together however you like—or let an algorithm do it for you—to define and refine your audiences. But the crucial point is that you need to know who your best customers are, what resonates with them, and what engages or disengages them from your brand before you can reach them. And the only way to solve these puzzling questions is with data, and lots of it.

But creating a complete audience profile can be tough when all the pieces of data you have—first party, second party, third party, offline, and online—are scattered. Which is why, according to Forrester, 47 percent of marketers say managing data from various sources inhibits their ability to create actionable insights.4

Integrate and unify your audience data with the right DMP.

Fortunately, new technology exists to consolidate all these pieces of data into a single, integrated data management platform (DMP). Not only can the right DMP integrate with all your first- and third-party data, including CRM or point-of-sale tools, it can also facilitate the buying and selling of second-party data through strategic partnerships.

Acting as the central processing hub, the DMP integrates all these different types of data in one location, analyzes them through algorithms and attribution models to find and refine who your high-value audiences are, and then seamlessly integrates its insights into your ad buying platform (known as a demand-side platform). From your DMP, you can identify myriad audiences that would likely purchase your product. You can segment by gender, income, car owners, or a hundred other parameters that the data suggests would be high-value segments.

Once you’ve segmented your most valuable and engaged audiences, you can take these “model” audiences—your best customers—and use their attributes to build larger audiences who look like and are predicted to behave like your best customers. You can even use data to expand your addressable audiences by pinpointing your target audience and then serving ads to just those customers.

Data transparency is critical to being able to do this well. Reporting should provide performance transparency, including insights into where in the journey consumers are converting to customers and which channels are involved in these conversions. It should also let you see how consumers are interacting across channels with your brand and the time it takes from first click to conversion, so you can keep your digital campaigns agile and hypertargeted.

Ultimately, by bringing all your data together, you can build holistic and nuanced pictures of the perfect audiences you want to target and then deliver those ads programmatically in real time. Best of all, it doesn’t have to be hard, or time-consuming, or require the skills of a data analyst because you’re using one platform to manage it all.

“It’s increasingly difficult to track when, where, and how digital ads are performing, but marketers are demanding more accountability.”6

STEPHAN BERINGER CEO of VivaKi

of marketers say better integration of their existing tools would improve the use of data for advertising.5

61%

52016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

0=Incomplete My company doesn’t have these capabilities. We’re still in the preplanning phases of our approach to marketing technology.

1=Partially complete My company’s achievement of the stated standard is qualified with multiple exceptions, or my company is developing a plan to meet the standard.

2=Mostly complete My company has generally met the stated standard for the component with limited exceptions, or it is actively working to meet the standard.

3=Complete My company meets the stated standard for the component.

In the chart below and following pages, you can assess your marketing technology maturity by grading your audience data, reach, engagement, and technology integration capabilities. This assessment tool is based off of Forrester's ”Enterprise Marketing Technology Needs Assessment Tool“ and customized with programmatic needs in mind.7

Scoring scale

62016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

Audience Data

Capability Value statement Score

Comprehensive management of all types of data

My company integrates all first-party data from mobile, website, and offline sources such as customer relationship management or point of sale.

We have access to buy or sell second-party data through strategic partnerships.

We integrate third-party data.

Identity management My company has a complete view of our audience by combining all of our data sources in one place.

Segmentation My company can identify new and high-value segments through dimensional breakdowns and segment comparisons.

Look-alike modeling My company can build larger audiences from smaller segments and reach more customers.

Data transparencyMy company understands our campaign performance with reporting transparency on user conversion journey, attributed per-channel performance, cross-channel interactions and conversion latency, and so on, so we can make the best decisions for our campaigns.

Audience Data score

Grade your data CAPABILITIES.

72016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

CHALLENGE SOLUTIONYou’re trying to fit pieces together from multiple channels.

Consumers are fickle. They bounce around from devices and channels as frequently as the wind changes direction. Yet they are also a demanding bunch—expecting you to meet them wherever they are with consistent, engaging experiences.

Today’s advertisers have access to advanced technology to search out and connect with consumers across channels and devices—including ad buying platforms for each channel and tools to optimize for each type of device. But rather than simplifying cross-channel digital campaigns, the multitude of solutions often further complicates them.

Over the past several years, the sheer number and rapid pace of technical innovations have made it difficult for digital marketers to keep up. “Agencies are plagued by platform overload—deciphering the merits, uses, and interoperability of the dozens (or hundreds) of platform-based buying tools on the market,” says Art Muldoon, CEO of Accordant Media.8

As a result, a large number of digital marketers donʼt take full advantage of platform-based buying. And those who do may hurt their overall marketing efforts by using overlapping platforms in conflicting ways, such as bidding against themselves or segmenting digital campaigns by channel rather than across all channels.

Unfortunately, many brands struggle to piece together a complete picture from multiple platforms and channels. For example, a retailer might run a search, display, and social campaign for their winter clearance sale. A different team runs each channel on a different platform. They each have their own budget and their own set of goals. While the teams try to talk with one another, they’re limited to looking at the campaigns across channels using spreadsheets. This structure prohibits them from making on-the-fly adjustments between campaigns, even when doing so would deliver the best customer experience and return on ad spend.

Use a single, cross-channel platform.

Agility is the key to programmatic success. But to be more agile, organizations need to break down channel silos and have their marketing teams collaborate and combine their insight and expertise across digital campaigns. Using a single, cross-channel ad buying platform will make this much easier to do.

With a centralized buying platform—one with broad access to inventory across channels—a brand can run all three campaigns from one place with a specific budget, time period, and set of goals. You can allocate budgets across the channels, while the platform uses algorithms and attribution models to figure out the most efficient way to spend the budget over the defined time period across a large swath of inventory.

Whatʼs more, the platform you select should provide transparency in media and technology costs—breaking out the cost per thousand from the technology so you know what youʼre paying for each. To ensure brand safety and control, the system should also have integrated fraud prevention and clear reporting of where your ads are running.

Brands that invest in a single platform say that it allows them to manage all their programmatic channels—including display, search, and social—from one location and has increased the scale of their digital campaigns with less ad spend. In Sears Canadaʼs case, they used site engagement data such as time spent on the site, product view, and page views to inform smarter social ad buying. As a result, they saw an 84 percent increase in return on ad spend, a 67 percent increase in revenue despite a 12 percent lower ad spend, and a 17 percent increase in product views on their site.9

7

82016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

Audience Reach

Capability Value statement Score

Access to inventory My company can access premium buying services with a broad reach across search, display, and social publishers.

Cross-channel campaign management My company can create and manage unified search, display, and social campaigns.

Real-time bid automation My company can act on data with automated real-time and rule-based decision-making.

Data integration My company gets a direct flow of engagement and conversion data aligned with media data for optimization, attribution, and reporting.

Cross-channel attribution My company understands the customer experience across all of our touchpoints—both online and offline.

Performance algorithms My company uses an automated optimization engine that enhances individual channel and overall campaign performances in real time.

Forecasting and planning tools My company uses media planning tools to accurately define and allocate campaign budgets based on potential performance outcomes.

Transparency My company gains visibility into media and technology costs with clear reporting to show exactly where ads are running.

Brand safety and control My company integrates fraud prevention, viewability, and brand safety through internal tools or third-party relationships.

Audience Reach score

Grade your campaign-management CAPABILITIES.

92016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

CHALLENGE SOLUTIONYour picture is complete, but no one’s interested.

At the end of the day, you can fit all the pieces together and know who your ideal audience is and where and how to reach them, but if your message doesnʼt hit the nail on the head, youʼll quickly lose their attention and all your previous efforts will have been wasted. The focus for advertisers is no longer just about driving cost savings through automated purchasing. Itʼs about fueling better customer experiences, precision targeting , and ultimately greater ROI.

Precision targeting doesnʼt depend solely on audience segmentation or look-alike modeling. It hinges on your ability to capitalize on live signals about what customers are looking for at the moment. As a marketer, you need to make individualized, on-the-fly messaging choices. For instance, if your customer just bought a computer, you need to deliver ads selling computer peripherals, not an Xbox.

For the highest engagement, your ads need to be informed by the data you already have and deliver what the consumer needs at that exact moment. But this kind of deep understanding of each individual customer requires not only unified data and cross-channel and cross-device insights, but also the ability to create ads that will speak to those desires at the precise moment theyʼre unfolding.

Personalize your message.

The ability to deliver personalized messages to each customer requires the ability to understand the userʼs past behavior and to build and deliver ads in real time. In fact, research shows that people interact with an ad twice as frequently when that ad is relevant to them.10

In Redbox s̓ case, having access to real-time feedback about consumer activity such as cart abandonment allowed them to send emails to a customer shortly after a shopping cart was abandoned. Due to the timeliness and relevance of the automated emails, Redbox saw a 130 percent increase in click rates and a 9 percent increase in open rates.11

With the right technology, marketers can go even further. Not just retargeting consumers, but also providing dynamic creative ads that are personalized to show the consumer with the most relevant message possible at the best moment possible.

“Programmatic creative is about the automation of creative production, but advertisers will still need to adjust the way they operate to fully leverage it,” says Ben Maitland, executive vice president of marketing and sales at MultiView, a B2B marketing company. “For a lot of advertisers, the message is an afterthought, but with programmatic creative, it’s starting to take center stage alongside data and media. Advertisers will need to start thinking about the creative strategy much earlier in the process and put more effort into synchronizing it with the media strategy.”12

For example, if you have an ad impression on ESPN, you want to be able to narrowly target your audience. You don’t want your ad to say, “Hey, football fan.” You want it to be able to draw on data to identify what team they align with through integration with your DMP. Then you want to be able to deliver an ad that says, “Hey, Seahawks fan” or “Hey, Steelers fan—buy tickets now.” But to be able to do this effectively, you need the ability to dynamically insert individual creative elements into your ads—NFL team logos, headlines, and ticket prices, for example. And you need to be able to do it across channels and devices, including display, mobile, video, search, social, and even native.

By adding this last piece—dynamic creative messaging capabilities—you not only have all the pieces of the programmatic puzzle, but they have real impact: the right audience, on the right channel, with a message that’s highly relevant.

102016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

Audience Engagement

Capability Value statement Score

Dynamic ad targeting My company personalizes creative to each customer through a system that can understand the user’s past behavior and build and deliver an ad in real time.

Ad types My company can deploy messages across display, mobile, video, search, social, and native channels.

Frequency capping My company can define the number of ads viewed by audiences.

Creative sequencing My company can deliver relevant creative in a sequential, random, or weighted order based on performance.

Audience Engagement score

Technology Integration

Capability Value statement Score

Platform integration My company personalizes creative to each customer through a system that can understand the user’s past behavior and build and deliver an ad in real time.

Data flow and visualization My company can deploy messages across display, mobile, video, search, social, and native channels.

Insights My company can define the number of ads viewed by audiences.

Technology Integration score

Grade your audience engagement and

technology integration CAPABILITIES.

112016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

If the way you’re doing programmatic today feels complicated or as if you’re throwing your ad dollars into a black box, you’re likely still missing some critical pieces of data or technology. And without those pieces in place, you won’t be able to reach your audience as efficiently as possible with the right message and channel.

By integrating analytics, audience targeting , and campaign management tools into a single platform, you’ll significantly simplify your programmatic campaigns. But, more important, you’ll gain the efficiency and transparency you need to maximize your ad spend and truly engage your audiences.

In the chart to the right, see what your company's strengths and weaknesses are and how you can enhance your marketing technology maturity level.

Find the missing PIECES.

Scoring results

Total score range Marketing technology maturity level

0 to 25Your company’s programmatic strategy and business processes are uncoordinated and still in the preplanning phases. Consider implementing an integrated DMP and DSP to help you achieve operational mastery.

26 to 41Your company is in the beginning stages of developing a programmatic plan. An integrated platform would help with your cross-channel initiatives.

42 to 56Your company generally meets its data and technology needs and is actively working to optimize and integrate its tools.

57 to 63Your company is highly sophisticated in its data and technology integration and continually looking to enhance its programmatic advertising.

Total score

122016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

In some ways, advertising hasn’t changed. Marketers must still find the best way at the best price to reach their ideal audience. But in other ways, everything about advertising has changed—there are many more channels and devices you need to use to reach your customers. And capturing their attention requires much more effort.

The beauty of programmatic is that it offers marketers the ability to test and measure reactions and to adjust messaging in nanoseconds to reflect those attitudes—taking advertising precision to a level that’s beyond human capabilities. What’s more, with integrated data and technology platforms, your digital campaigns are more automated and less complex. And when you have visibility into your ad buying and you know what it’s costing you, where your ads are running, and how they’re performing, it’s simple to make the right decisions that allow you to maximize your ad spend and audience reach.

That’s all there is to it—put the pieces of data and technology that you need into play, and let the machines do the rest of the work.

“The integration of our display program and our analytics, as well as transparency into our media costs, has armed us with the ability to track ROI more accurately and has provided valuable insights, enabling us to make smarter advertising decisions.”13

KATY WORTHAM digital marketing director at CreditCards.com

Programmatic SIMPLIFIED.

132016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

With its integrated technology, Adobe Marketing Cloud can help you manage a vast array of data sets, create high-value audiences, and efficiently reach them across channels with a connected programmatic buying experience. Integrate the following Adobe solutions to strip away the complexity of programmatic buying:

For more information, go to http://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud/programmatic-advertising.html.

ADOBE can help.

Adobe Media Optimizer: Search, display, and social campaign management and optimization allow you to run accurate simulations and budget recommendations.

Adobe Analytics: Use engagement or conversion metrics to create models and recommendations to drive campaign performance in Adobe Media Optimizer.

Adobe Audience Manager: Combine all of your data sources in one place and create customer profiles.

Adobe Campaign: Use loyal customer lists to run social retargeting campaigns through Adobe Media Optimizer.

142016 | Solving the programmatic puzzle.

1 “The CMO’s Guide to Programmatic Buying,” Advertising Age, March 19, 2014.

2 “Media’s Buying Evolution Challenges Marketers,” Forrester, December 8, 2015.

3 “Programmatic Branding Driving Upper-Funnel Consumer Engagement,” Econsultancy, 2015.

4 “How Predictive Marketing Analytics Boosts B2B Business Performance,” Forrester, December 2015.

5 “Marketing Data Technology: Cutting Through the Complexity,” Winterberry Group, January 2015.

6 Merickel, Justin, “Adobe Unveils Industry’s Most Advanced Programmatic Advertising Platform.” Adobe, September 15, 2015.

7 This assessment tool is based on Forrester’s “Enterprise Marketing Technology Needs Assessment Tool” in “Make the Business Case for Programmatic Digital Media Buying,” Forrester, October 26, 2015.

8 Ebbert, John, “What’s the Biggest Challenge With Platform Buying In Digital Today?,” Ad Exchanger, November 7, 2011.

9 “Driving Results Through Programmatic for Retail,” Adobe, accessed April 8, 2016.

10 “Media Economy Report: Better, Smarter, Faster: How Data Is Changing Our Business,” Magna Global USA, Inc., Vol. 04, 2014.

11 “Entertainment Made Easy,” Adobe Customer Success Story, July 2013.

12 Rowley, Liz, “Programmatic Creative Across Devices: The Opportunity and the Challenge,” AdExchanger, June 15, 2015.

13 Kluge, Pete, “Take Programmatic Display to the Next Level,” Marketing Land, April 13, 2015.

Adobe and the Adobe logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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Adobe Marketing Cloud empowers companies to use big data to effectively reach and engage customers and prospects with highly personalized marketing content across devices and digital touchpoints. Eight tightly integrated solutions offer marketers a complete set of marketing technologies that focus on analytics, web and app experience management, testing and targeting, advertising, audience management, video, social engagement, and campaign orchestration. The tie-in with Adobe Creative Cloud makes it easy to quickly activate creative assets across all marketing channels. Thousands of brands worldwide—including two-thirds of Fortune 50 companies—rely on Adobe Marketing Cloud with over 30.4 trillion transactions a year.https://www.adobe.com/marketing-cloud.html