Agency Employees: Three Factors to Consider for Choosing A Programmatic Platform

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As a marketer, you know how programmatic advertising can increase profitability for your clients. As an IMC Masters candidate with interest in programmatic marketing, I have found two great articles that can help you pick the programmatic platform that is best for your agency.

Article 1: Makad, Sam. “8 Things To Consider Before Choosing a Best Programmatic Advertising Platform." The Next Scoop.

      In this first article, Sam Makad discusses the factors that he feels are important to consider before choosing a programmatic advertising platform. Makad highlights the benefits of programmatic tools, such as automatizing bidding, buying, and placement of digital ads. The article emphasizes the importance of transparency. Bot traffic is an issue for some programmatic platforms; thus, it is important to ensure that your advertisements are receiving authentic impressions. Makad continues by stating the underrated importance of a strong technical support staff. Much of the technology surrounding programmatic marketing is new, so technical support needs are often times abundant. It is important to ensure that your programmatic platform will have a reachable support staff so that you can best utilize the platform’s capabilities.

  https://frank.ai/how-to-do-programmatic-marketing/

Article 2: Deshpande, Indrajeet. “Top 5 Programmatic Advertising Platforms for 2020 and Beyond.” Martech Advisor.

The second article moves into specific platforms and their capabilities, tying important concepts into practice. In specific, Deshpande discusses his top five picks for programmatic platforms right now: SmartyAds, TubeMogul, Simpli.fi, MediaMath, and PubMatic. In the article, Deshpande breaks down the specific advantages for each platform. He highlights SmartyAds’ versatility, with display, in-app, video, and native capabilities across desktop and mobile devices. He acknowledges TubeMogul as a platform with great TV capabilities that compensates advertisers for fraudulent traffic. Deshpande points out Simpli.fi’s capabilities to import CRM data that’ll enhance audience targeting and MediaMath’s omnichannel end-to-end capabilities. Finally, he declares PubMatic as his favorite platform that offers solutions for both brands and publishers.

Based on my analysis of these two articles and my expertise as an IMC student, I have three recommendations to consider when picking the programmatic platform that best fits your agency and its clients’ needs.

•         Capabilities Drive Success - Determine which programmatic advertising platforms have the most features that are relevant to you and your clients.

•      Ensure It’s Affordable - Figure out which platform is most affordable for your company.

•         Integrate Social Capabilities - Recognize which programmatic advertising platforms have capabilities compatible with the social networks which you advertise on.

By following these action items, you will be able to choose a programmatic marketing platform that best matches the needs of your agency and clients. Following these action items will ensure that you choose a programmatic platform that is easy to use and drives profits.

About The Author:

     

Lukas Stachtiaris

Candidate in Northwestern University's IMC Masters Program

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News Outlets: 3 Ways to Increase Millennial Interaction with Online Content

For news outlets, creating and sharing content online is more important now than ever. Given our increasingly digital world, appealing to millennial readers by focusing on making web content more accessible isn’t an option—it’s a requirement of the industry. As a Northwestern student specializing in journalism and integrated marketing communications, I’ve found two articles that I think you will find interesting as you consider how to best reach millennial news consumers.

In her article for Business Insider, Audrey Schomer notes that millennials (age 21-37) consume a mere 8,766 minutes of news a year on average compared to their older counterparts, who consume closer to 30,103 minutes a day. Yet she also highlights the fact that when millenials do consume news, its digital reach is greater than it is to that same older age group—digital news reaches 88% of millennials. A last important note from Schomer’s article—many people in this demographic highlight convenience as their favorite aspect of social media; further, about half (48%) of social media news consumers ages 18-29 felt that accessing news on social made them better informed. Thus, it stands to reason that streamlining web content would increase millennial consumption of news.

A graphic from a 2018 Nielsen study on digital media use.

(Source: https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2018/time-flies-us-adults-now-spend-nearly-half-a-day-interacting-with-media.html)

As per the graph above, Nielsen conducted a study in July of 2018 that resulted in a shocking outcome—American adults spend over 11 hours a day listening to, watching, reading, and interacting with digital media. Notably, smartphones are the tool that enables a great deal of this usage. Over 72% of the 18-34 demographic view video content on social networking sites at least once a day, if not more; various digital platforms allow consumers to stay connected to the digital world to a greater extent than they ever have before. Younger generations tend to devote the majority of their time to smartphones and computers instead of TV; the portability of new devices allows adults older than 18 to spend an average of 45 minutes a day on social media—in large part on smartphones.

Given these insights, I’ve developed three action items that will help news outlets make their content more accessible to millennial consumers:

·             Turn to social.

o   Digital news reaches 88% of millennials while national TV news reaches 61% of them; thus, providers would do better to produce news for social to hit a wider target demographic.

·             Convenience is key.

o   Since digital consumers see so much media every day, they will not take the extra time to investigate materials that aren’t convenient to access, meaning that news agencies / marketing firms need to make sure their digital material is right at consumers’ fingers.

·             Hook consumers early.

o   Digital consumers spend, on average, 11 hours interacting with digital media a day—they see a lot of news, so make content interesting/interactive to get clicks.

Effective use of digital content can make or break a news outlet, and the industry must implement it to grow.