Digital media: No longer about the audience

Gone are the days where large budgets are spent on premium rich media placements on premium sites. Large 24 hour page takeovers and interactive video banners provide a large canvas for clients to build their brands, but at what cost?

Yes, the placements are premium, eyeballs are guaranteed and the content is updated and of interest to a specific group of consumers. But why spend R100k on one ad unit for a 24 hour buy-out driving 2000 eyeballs to your brand page, when you can spend that R100k on real-time bidding networks and drive 10,000 eyeballs to your site? The number of people interacting with your brand's content is up to five times more.

Real-time bidding networks

Real-time bidding networks allow for brands to bid on online inventory on an auction basis, in real time, one ad impression and click at a time. It is becoming more popular in the industry to buy and sell online display advertising using this method. With this method campaigns are optimised by bidding for inventory during certain times of the day, against competitors and ad placements.

This allows for the cost of the ad impression to decrease as the campaign goes on and learning's are taken. If, for example, and impressions costs less between 2pm-3pm during the day due to competitor spending trends and online audience engagement, the advertiser is able to time target the campaign to those times only, or push out more budget during this time. This reduces the cost of the impression, increases the amount of impressions which can now be bought, drives more traffic to the clients' owned platforms, and ultimately gives the client a higher return on their investment.

Media owners need to start looking at more innovative buying methods to expand their offerings - premium ad placements, premium content and exclusive audiences are becoming a thing of the past. The future of online display advertising lies in real-time bidding networks that offer agencies a platform to optimise campaigns and buy media in the most relevant and cost effective way and thus increasing their client's ROI.