#InnovationMonth: The beauty of programmatic advertising

Shippey

FashionBeauty.Network is the first programmatic advertising platform in South Africa for the fashion, beauty and fragrance industries. It lets you place adverts across every possible digital medium, whether website or app, on all the different online niches fashionistas frequent, at the right time of day for them to be able to pay attention to it.

While talk of advert placement management through a demand-side platform and real-time bidding still strikes fear in the hearts of most marketers due to its expensive nature and the fact that little of it is available locally, Amorphous Stride’s new offering is set to shake things up as a cost-per view ranges from 15c to as little as 7c.

Why programmatic? Aside from the fact that it means measurability is a piece of cake, Shippey describes the benefits as follows:

• Marketers and advertisers: Get access to smart, well-priced advertising space, which can be targeted to myriad factors, for example: Reach women interested in buying make-up. So you’re reaching consumers with an active interest in what you’re promoting, making it easier to hit those consumer sweet spots when coordinating a marketing campaign.
• Publishers: Get to open the ad space for sale via the programmatic networks, allowing for a broader customer base and highly cost-effective sales channels.

FBN is a good fit as Amorphous is a hybrid agency and media house. Shippey calls it ‘hybrid’ because although they’re a digital agency, they also make their own media with products like the location-based SMS messaging and audience insights tool, Hudlr.

Fashion and beauty, rolled into one.

In addition, they publish the digital edition of Edgars Club Magazine, and represent third-party ad inventory through their programmatic offering. Programmatic thus fits in as the logical next step in the mobile media industry, with the aim to “package up audiences of interest”. Fashion and beauty is just the first vertical, with plans to launch more over the coming months using the .Network high-level domain.

Advertise where your audience is

It’s a good place to start as there’s no doubt digital advertising is of utmost importance for the fashion and beauty industries. Shippey admits Instagram and Pinterest do well in drawing consumer attention as they’re “havens of users with a deep love of the industry,” but he says getting a retail or brand message out to a mass digital audience requires platform independence. So while the likes of Instagram can deliver engaged audiences through content marketing techniques with a younger, less affluent audience in most cases, (that’s Kardashians aside, of course), driving the scale to retail adoption of the campaign requires a broader strategy.

He adds that a recent study found mobile is preferred over print magazines for fashion inspiration. Amorphous Stride thus wants to capitalise on the changing consumption habits of consumers from print and TV to mobile, and programmatic is how they plan on doing it.

Click here for more on the FashionBeauty.Network and follow Amorphous Stride on Twitter for updates.