Programmatic advertising has taken on an important role in performance marketing and has seen exponential growth as a result. According to a report by Statista, global programmatic ad spend reached an estimated US$129b over the past year, with spending set to surpass $150b 2021. As a performance channel, programmatic provides advertisers with the ability to reach audiences at scale where other channels can’t because of cost implications and competition.
InMobi’s Narayan Murthy (director of digital native & performance, Southeast Asia) caught up with Mediadonuts’ Vishal Kanse, (regional ad operations head, Asia Pacific) to talk candidly about the changing times and shifting demands and behaviors of the digital native generation, how programmatic advertising fits into performance marketing, the future of agency landscape, and much more.
How do you think agencies have risen to the challenges (the pandemic; reduced spending) posed in recent times?
The initial period – the first six to seven months – were very hard, since no one knew what was going to happen. The impact was huge, because clients were unsure where to spend their money, because much of the budgeted spending they had planned had now stopped.
In what ways is Mediadonuts, as a digital-first agency, adapting to the changing times and shifting demands and behaviors of the digital native generation?
In terms of the change in demands from the client, one is the representation of the performance data. Another change is finding out for clients how they can solve problems with cross-channel solutions, or maybe brand new ways of identifying the audience base, such as what the new media opportunities are in this time of change, what the current media consumption style of the audience is, etc. And accordingly, right away, we can suggest that this is the audience’s behaviors. Apart from data, market research is another key area where we are putting more effort into understanding and explaining to the client how to reach the correct audience.
How is Mediadonuts helping clients stay ahead of the curve and leveraging new adtech trends when it comes to their performance campaigns?
Programmatic comes in as a very large chunk since it’s essentially choosing the right audience. We can select the audience we want through programmatic, we can segment down to any level that is required by the client. And this is possible, apart from in the local walled gardens of the ecosystem. So that makes a difference. Because the clients don’t just want to spend only into the walled gardens, because they know they have their own kind of base. Apart from that, the basic question is what can we do where programmatic comes in? We can do rich media, we can do video – there is nothing we cannot do with programmatic from audience targeting, from the creative perspective, from the data analytics, tracking measurement, measuring the success of the uplift of the campaigns, or showcasing how the brand has been evolved to the user base.
According to you, what are the three most important things that marketers should keep in mind when it comes to outcome-based and impact-driven campaigns?
First and foremost is the presentation of the data – whether it’s a sales rep or an ad ops guy, we need to present the data correctly. It’s important for us to put ourselves in the client’s shoes where they understand – especially if they don’t have knowledge of the …….