Programmatic advertising: the marriage of creativity with technology

Victor Navarro

According to Navarro, humans haven’t adopted technology faster than the speed at which they’ve adopted mobile. “We’re seeing huge numbers of smartphones in developing markets including South America and even Africa,” he says. Interestingly, digital budgets are starting to shift towards mobile. “Within the next year we’ll see as high as ¾ of digital traffic will be mobile, especially in developed markets like the UK.”

As a result of mobile, consumers are “always on”, which means they can access info regardless of where they are and therefore expect messages to be relevant to them. Navarro encourages advertisers to reach their audience through the micro moments and break through the “noise” created by the many voices vying for consumers’ attention. “We need to understand the personal moment which people have on their phones and understand the context in which the consumer is engaging with their phone and then what type of communication is going to be most effective to reach them,” explains Navarro, "You shouldn’t be running mobile campaigns that aren’t based on audience insights, because then you’re regressing to the desktop days."

Location is everything

Navarro explains that advertisers need to pay attention to consumers’ location as a way of understanding who they are as people. To get the audience thinking about location, he provided a few examples such as: are your consumers at a festival, sporting event or perhaps commuting to work?

“A recent study from Google shows that 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from a mobile site that customises information according to their location,” explains Navarro, “So, there’s been a shift to spend more on location based mobile advertising. In the next three to five years, more than 40% of spend will be dedicated to location.”

© Karolina Grabowska via Pixabay

Navarro explained that consumer location data can be found via:

• Apps and GPS data - “The power of mobile is location and apps are what’s driving that. GPS data can only be received via apps and very few mobile web providers share that info. When we speak to clients about wherein we buy media, in app environment is the most accurate way to leverage location to target consumers. We need to have a conversation shift with our clients, as a lot of clients are used to desktop activity and dealing with publishers they know and are comfortable with.”

• Wifi - Not as pinpoint as apps, but provides some information as to where consumers are.

• Internet Provider (IP) - This can be extremely inaccurate depending on whether you’re in the same city as your IP or not.

• Mobile providers - These provide latitude and longitude information. “It’s really important that you have a provider that has an up-to-date point of interest database coupled with the best and most accurate location based data delivered through apps,” adds Navarro.

Getting around ad blockers

With consumers - especially millennials - increasingly adopting ad blockers, we need to ask ourselves: Are we providing the best user experience to our customers?

According to Navarro, here’s how you can improve the user experience:

• Be aware of the fact that users don’t read, they scan. Set up your ad in a mobile, user friendly fashion.
  
• Include ads in a natural, fluid way
  
• Deliver interesting creative that also makes the most of the technology at your disposal. Good creative grabs attention, but relevant creative also creates interest.
  
• Use location. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the same message.

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For more articles on programmatic advertising, read Online marketing: Going beyond the click with programmatic buying and Programmatic advertising increases globally.