In every channel and interaction, the best advertising is driven by the consumer experience. The better that experience is perceived by consumers, the greater the opportunity that brands will win them over for business.
Sounds simple, except the competitive landscape of digital media has made it increasingly difficult for brand marketers to communicate their message to audiences and achieve a needed depth of engagement for success. Consequently, ads that offered little relevance to consumer interests and were disruptive to online experiences became the priority as marketers vied for consumer attention. Ad-blockers emerged as a popular solution for consumers to voice their displeasure, contributing to falling ad revenues and negative brand opinions by those neglecting consumer preferences.
Then came native advertising. While many initially doubted its value, ‘native’ proved its worth by putting trust back into the brand-consumer relationship. The benefits of native advertising’s ability to offer personalisation and quality became key drivers for advertisers to acquire and retain consumer interests. With greater personalisation and quality of content, publishers could also better serve their viewers with greater pieces of content, and better serve their client’s campaigns with higher response rates.
Programmatic Gets the Native Treatment
How quickly we can turn a blind eye to the past. While native have reshaped the industry, programmatic now has an undeserved reputation for remnant inventory, despite its great promise to make native advertising even more powerful.
More than just putting two industry buzzwords together, ‘programmatic native’ is that needed innovation to make advertising better again. The US market has most embraced programmatic trading, with 87.7% of native advertising expected to be purchased programmatically in 2020. Growth opportunities remain, as international markets come around to the value of programmatic buying within a native advertising strategy, despite the misconception that programmatic inventory lacks visibility. The fact is, programmatic doesn’t have such concerns when leveraged in a native environment.
First, native advertising is all about relevance, as it is content-based and personalised according to consumer interests. Rather than be intrusive, native is designed to inform and delight every person with interesting and trustworthy discoveries that truly engage. Second, native provide convenience, as content is consistent with the editorial environment in which they live, and blends seamlessly with the look and feel of the site to serve as organic content. Native’s purpose is not to push audiences into content, but pull them in with true engagement.
The Benefits of Programmatic
Globally, programmatic will account for 68% of digital media in 2020, according to a Zenith study. With the addition of programmatic as a global buying channel for native advertising, quality requirements can be assured for both performance and branding goals. A main concern by doubters is that programmatic runs the risk of misplacing ads in the wrong environment, when really the focus should be on its ability to support a truly massive inventory that expands the advertiser’s potential reach – meaning that ads can be seen by many more people. Programmatic native supports advanced audience targeting, and even provides a richer range of options due to the sheer volume of user-generated data that is available for analysis. The automated nature of programmatic opens the doors for brands to manipulate their creativity in real-time and according to available customer insights. The creative capability to use this data only strengthens the consumer experience.
Another key advantage of programmatic is its real-time nature of ad buying, as advertisers can bid in real-time for the best ad placement at the lowest price, on numerous ad exchanges at once, using AI-driven algorithms to enhance reliability of results.
Getting Programmatic with Zemanta
Simply put – programmatic native breaks through the disruptive nature unseen by other advertising channels. Results are derived from the balance of being able to optimise for reach and frequency, while optimising for actual engagement, actions and conversions. Therefore, doing native programmatically means more scale and efficiencies without losing any data and targeting. Unlike display, native advertising is far more focused on delivering clicks, i.e traffic as well as conversions; therefore, a successful DSP would be geared toward delivering clicks, and performance after the first click.
With a platform like Zemanta, the best native DSP with access to the largest native supply pool in the world, marketers are able to scale their efforts much more effectively at scale than anywhere else. Zemanta is the most effective programmatic and real-time technology player in the programmatic space, and unlike DSP display that is designed to buy impressions, Zemanta’s DNA is performance. This allows brands to pilot campaigns according to post-click indicators – past time, bounce rate, lead generation, CPA, and others – via Zemanta’s unique feature of First Party Analytics integration. As a result, Zemanta provides distinct targeting and optimisation abilities that are rarely found in programmatic buying.
By being dynamic with the content that is served to consumers, and leveraging data to segment audiences in the most creative ways, brands can also reap business rewards when proving to inspire the right people, at exactly the right time.
Authored article by Veena Shobhani – Director of Partnerships and Operations – Outbrain India.
