As of 2015, programmatically bought digital ads already
accounted for more than half of all US digital display advertising (more than
$10 billion). But there are some serious problems with programmatic. Just came
to know that comScore launches independent metrics for programmatic buying and
these points came to my mind. So though of sharing with you.
Quality of Ads - Programmatic media buying has lead cost per
impression down dramatically but the overall quality of digital ads within
programmatic environments has plummeted. Viewability and bot traffic issues
really need to be taken care of on priority. Otherwise it will act as an evil
for the whole industry.
Low user interaction - Programmatic has traditionally
limited creative capabilities by only enabling standard ad formats to be bought
at scale. This trend has led to brands serving 1990s-style ads with 2015 media
buying technology. This is the era where brands are recognizing the need to
personalize messaging to drive consumer engagement. In fact, 54 percent of
consumers find personalized ads to be more engaging, and 74 percent indicated
they desire some type of content personalization. Those aren’t small numbers.
The need of the hour is to personalize advertising using big data.
Limited Understanding of Technology- Programmatic is like a
teen age sex everyone wants to do it but very few know how to do it perfectly
:). There are limited peoples who know about it. Most of the people working for
and managing brands do not know much about it. And if we are not aware of the
technology then the chances of being fooled is on the higher side. While it is
not necessary to know the deep inner-workings of each technology, it is
important to have a basic understanding of how it is working for your brand.
Any programmatic partner worth working with should be ready and willing to
answer any questions you have about the technology powering your campaigns and
what is unique to their specific approach.
Measuring the Performance- When it comes to data and key
performance indicators, such as customer lifetime value, purchase size and cost
per acquisition, then there are limited partners who can actually provide you
these stats. Transparency is another issue which needs to be taken care of. And
the advertiser should know where exactly their ads had been shown. Unlike the
black box approach used by many players in the programmatic space, it is
important that your partner provides full and transparent campaign performance
and learning with insights that can feed directly into a advertiser's CRM and
they can use it for future planning as well.
Paying for Unviewable Ads- Now a days the spend is getting
shifted towards video impressions but Google says that nearly half of video
impressions are Unviewable. In 2014, "Vindico, an ad management platform
company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to
be 'unviewable. The need of the hour is to resolve viewability issue on
priority. The issue is similar for all other platforms as well.
Brand Safety: When you're buying media directly from
publishers, you can require that your ads be displayed only in proximity to
content that supports and compliments the brand image and association you're
trying to establish or reinforce. When there isn't transparency with the sites
that are included in the ad exchange, combined with machines (instead of humans)
optimizing for results, brand safety is no longer guaranteed. Until more
transparency is brought into programmatic buying, companies must weigh the
benefits of cost efficiency and machine learning with brand safety.
