Programmatic Newbie

You’ve decided to take programmatic advertising for a test drive! You have a discrete budget allocated toward testing programmatic media. Well, fasten your seatbelts, because we know you’re going to be impressed with what you will learn.

First, let’s make sure you’re getting the most value at this stage of your programmatic evolution. Although your campaign is probably simple, consisting of one media channel that is most likely display, it will still benefit from the advanced targeting capabilities offered by programmatic. 

• If you’re an HCP marketer, you’re probably using your target NPI list to inform your HCP advertising buy. You can also use more sophisticated targeting approaches such as Smart Lists, which target NPIs based on specific digital behaviors (e.g., visiting your brand website) or clinical behavior to target NPIs by their Rx/Dx profile. 
• If you’re a DTC marketer, consider experimenting with contextual targeting, third-party data segments from suppliers like Crossix, Swoop, or PurpleLab, point-of-care targeting, and overlays such as weather targeting from The Weather Channel and IBM Watson to better pinpoint your target consumers.

Evaluating the value of your campaign is an important objective at this stage. You should be measuring audience quality to assess targeting precision, CPM to evaluate cost efficiency, and reach and frequency to evaluate media delivery. Also look at your campaign in terms of speed-in-market. Unlike direct buys, programmatic advertising gives you data about your campaign in real time and the ability to use that data to optimize your campaign mid-flight. 

Upon the conclusion of your test, you will be able to show your management (if you’re a brand marketer) or your clients (if you’re the agency) that programmatic gives you precise targeting against your audience, lower CPMs (estimated at $45 versus $300 for direct buys), predictable delivery (of your reach and frequency goals), and immediate optimization opportunities. 

At this point, you will also be able to tell which of your non-programmatic buys are underperforming versus programmatic. You can use these findings to justify moving more of your budget from direct buys to programmatic. 

Once you’re able to allocate a larger portion of your media budget toward programmatic, you’ll be ready to move up the programmatic maturity curve to become a Programmatic Scaler. At that stage, you will scale up your plan to span multiple brands and channels, and you’ll successfully deliver greater cost efficiency, control, and customization for your campaigns.