Programmatic Scaler

Programmatic media now constitutes a growing portion of your media budget. You’re buying across multiple brands and multiple channels, including display, video, native, and search. You’re well on your way to reaping the benefits of programmatic! 

Your focus at this stage of your programmatic evolution is to scale up your media buy as efficiently as possible. To get the most value, you should lean more on the capabilities built into your programmatic advertising platform. Here are a few platform capabilities that you (or your programmatic partner) should be taking advantage of:

  1. Planning: Use the platform’s planning tools to help you forecast total campaign spend based on campaign requirements and divide your budget across channels based on supply (how much inventory is available at the price you want to pay) and channel insights (when and where your audience is active).
  2. Creative: While your creative agency will need to create your display and video banners, you can rely on your programmatic partner to create your native ads and your programmatic platform to generate search extensions at no additional cost to you.
  3. Targeting: In addition to targeting by NPI list for HCP marketers, or third-party segments for DTC marketers, your programmatic advertising platform should have a wealth of sophisticated audience signals such as clinical activity, condition propensity, and digital activity, which can be used to inform your targeting.

Since efficiency is the driving force at this stage of programmatic maturity, make sure you’re measuring media clicks and engagement in real time and optimizing your buys mid-flight to invest in those placements that are giving you better engagement. You may even be able to measure and optimize your placements based on qualified audience reach (percentage of the audience reached that meets your criteria). 

Once your campaigns are running efficiently, you’ll be ready to move up the programmatic maturity curve to become a Programmatic Sophisticate, where your focus will be on driving marketing impact. Your programmatic buy will grow to cover more channels, and you will use sophisticated technology and data to fine-tune your business results (i.e., audience quality, NRx, and TRx). At this stage you’ll become more self-sufficient and less reliant on partners to plan and trade for you. Fasten your seatbelts!