Programmatic Sophisticate

You’re ready to use advanced technology features and data to fine-tune your programmatic advertising campaigns with the goal of driving results and delivering ROI. You’re on your way to driving transformational impact for your brands.

Your campaigns are now being implemented across multiple channels: display, video, native, and search, as well as new formats for traditional channels such as TV and audio/radio. By activating all channels on one platform, you can now control the frequency of your touchpoints across channels (per NPI for your HCP buys and per device for your consumer buys). This gives you greater control over the efficiency of your buy, the customer experience you’re delivering, and the impact of your campaign. This is impossible to do across direct buys. 

On the flip side, your buy is getting pretty complex. In this multi-brand, multichannel, multi-format landscape, how can you structure and manage the various drivers of ROI? Here are the things you should be paying attention to:

  1. Customer Journey: Start thinking about your media plan in terms of the customer journey. Use different targeting capabilities and channels to align with different stages of the journey, and tailor your messages to meet the needs of the customer at each stage. For example, use CTV for broad awareness and contextual targeting alongside disease management content for disease education. 
  2. Channel–Creative Optimization: You should be compulsively measuring the impact of each channel, as well as each channel/creative combination, using media metrics like AQ, CTR, and CPM. Deploy the best performing creative first. 
  3. Umbrella Effect: Don’t forget to measure the overall impact of your campaign so you know how all your targeting and creative tactics work together. Your endpoints will include media metrics, as well as clinical data like Rx lift. If you’re also investing in a few direct buys from select premium publishers (e.g., WebMD or Medscape), make sure you’re measuring the synergistic effect across your various buys.
  4. Visibility into Full Marketing Funnel: Since you will have mapped out the customer journey during the planning stage, you can observe and proactively manage performance at each stage as well as total funnel throughput to make sure you’re delivering conversions. 

As you finesse your media framework and start to show meaningful business impact, senior agency and client management will become more interested in programmatic. Communicate with them strategically and make them advocates. If you’re a DTC marketer, leverage the leadership support you get at this stage to make the case for building your own first-party data using LiveRamp or another DMP.

Once you have this stage fully operational and optimized, you’ll be ready for the next stage, Programmatic First, when you’ll start doing real cross-channel marketing for the first time.