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Anding Report

The report discusses the growing adoption of programmatic branding among marketers, highlighting its efficiency and ability to support brand advertising. It reveals that 62% of marketers are using programmatic for branding, with significant benefits such as real-time optimization and cost reduction, though challenges like skills gaps and data privacy concerns remain. The future of programmatic branding looks promising, with expectations of a 37% increase in ad spend by 2017.

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Anding Report

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Market Data / Supplier Selection /

Event Presentations / User Experience

Benchmarking / Best Practice /
Template Files / Trends & Innovation


Programmatic Branding

Driving upper-funnel consumer

engagement

In association with Quantcast

Programmatic
Branding
Driving upper-funnel consumer
engagement

In association with Quantcast

Published May 2015 Econsultancy London Econsultancy New York Econsultancy Singapore
4th Floor, Wells Point 350 7th Avenue, Suite 307 20 Collyer Quay
79 Wells Street New York, NY 10001 #23-01
London W1T 3QN United States Singapore
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be United Kingdom 049319
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, Telephone:
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording Telephone: +1 212 971 0630 Telephone:
or any information storage and retrieval system, without +44 207 269 1450 +65 6653 1911
prior permission in writing from the publisher.
http://econsultancy.com
Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2015 [email protected]
Contents
1. Executive Summary ......................................................... 4
1.1. Opinions about programmatic advertising ................................ 8
1.2. About Econsultancy .................................................................... 9
1.3. About the author ......................................................................... 9

2. Foreword by Quantcast.................................................. 10
2.1. About Quantcast ......................................................................... 11

3. Overview ........................................................................ 12
3.1. About this report ........................................................................ 12
3.2. Contributors ............................................................................... 13
3.3. Methodology ............................................................................... 13

4. Introduction: The New Digital Brand Landscape ......... 14

4.1. The evolution of programmatic media ......................................16
4.2. Is programmatic ready for brand scale? .................................... 17
4.3. Organisational disruption is a prerequisite for
programmatic branding ............................................................. 21
4.4. The real-time nature of modern marketing ............................. 23

5. Programmatic Everything: The Omnichannel Vision ... 26

5.1. Programmatic direct and workflow automation ...................... 27

6. The Impact of Mobile on Programmatic Branding ....... 32

7. The Role of Video in Programmatic Branding .............. 34
8. How Measurement Impacts Programmatic Branding .. 36
8.1. Multi-touch attribution: key to programmatic branding ......... 38
8.2. Brand safety is a key part of measurability .............................. 39

9. The Role of Data Management in Programmatic

Branding ........................................................................ 41
10. Contributors ................................................................... 43

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 3

After assessing the opinions of marketing and technology stakeholders surveyed in this report, it
is clear that the programmatic ad technology ‘pipes’ developed over the last decade are now being
operationalised to support brand (equity) advertising.

This report, produced in partnership with Quantcast, is based on interviews with both client-
side digital professionals, agencies and vendors, as well a survey of more than 100 senior-level
marketers in the UK and the US.

Almost two-thirds of marketers (62%) surveyed said they were running programmatic advertising
campaigns specifically for branding objectives as opposed to direct response. On average, 40% of
programming spending goes towards branding campaigns, according to the survey.

Increased efficiency (64%), reduced overall advertising costs (58%), the ability to optimise in real
time (56%) and the opportunity to leverage first-party data (52%) were the advantages of
programmatic branding most likely to be cited as ‘major benefits’ by marketers.

However, it is clear that there are still some barriers that must be overcome to enable further
investment. According to our survey, 57% of marketers agreed that there is a skills gap in the
programmatic advertising industry, highlighting the need for training on related skills. The survey
also found that 41% of responding companies were doing programmatic advertising exclusively
in-house.

Marketers also have their reservations over the control they cede in using programmatic. When
asked about the barriers to increased investment in programmatic branding, almost a quarter
(23%) of respondents pointed to ‘data privacy’, while ‘lack of transparency’ (16%) and ‘brand
safety issues’ (13%) were also cited as primary concerns.

Despite these challenges, it is clear that Programmatic branding has a bright future, with
marketers expecting to have increased their programmatic ad spend by an average of 37% by
2017.

Other findings from the research include:

 Programmatic: Ad technology, designed to power data-driven audience buying, and
pointed largely at direct response advertising, has evolved sufficiently to support equity
advertising. Once a single-channel medium (display), ad tech can now programmatically
connect marketers to inventory across mobile screens, video players, addressable television
and even digital out-of-home.

The proliferation of addressable channels that can be accessed programmatically, along with
newly evolved reporting functionality, makes it possible for ambitious marketers to justify
pulling budget from linear television, print and radio, and into digital channels where
programmatic efficiencies and real-time delivery can increase lift at lower costs. Brands will
increasingly depend on programmatic access to media for equity advertising, as a means of
both procurement and delivery.

Programmatic has the potential of fulfilling the promises of digital marketing. In our survey,
64% of respondents considered that the increased efficiency of campaigns is a major benefit of
programmatic, while 56% pointed to the ability to optimise and target the audience in real
time.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 4

Marketers must react to various signals, emanating from social channels, review sites, in-store
mobile interactions and more to try and create awareness and influence brand sentiment.
Gaining an omnichannel competency requires organisational disruption that starts with
evolving the traditional marketing mindset, involves breaking existing data silos and gaining
internal competencies around the programmatic delivery of paid, owned and earned brand
messages. Brand marketers must have omnichannel competency to be successful in
programmatic brand advertising.

An important aspect of building a truly omnichannel approach is an attribution framework.

According to our survey, 53% of respondents agreed that effective multi-touch attribution is
the key to further programmatic branding investment, compared to only 9% who disagree.

Figure 1: ‘Effective multi-touch attribution is the key to further programmatic

branding investment’ – agree or disagree

8% 1%
21%

38%

32%

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Somewhat disagree Strongly disagree

Respondents: 100

 Mobile: The rapid proliferation of mobile devices (90% global mobile penetration and 50%
smartphone penetration in evolved markets) has also shaken marketers. Not only has
attention shifted to multiple screens, but the amount of unique data that marketers can collect
from mobile devices (hyper-location, elevation, biometrics, etc.) has changed the game from a
targeting and analytics perspective.

Mobile has also impacted ecommerce in a fundamental way, disrupting the traditional notion
of consumer ‘moment of truth’ brand decision-making, wherein consumers have immediate
access to product information at all times – as well as the ability to interact, and comment on,

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 5

As mobile represents a large portion of the potential programmatic audience it is imperative

that marketers are able to deliver compelling experiences that are worth a consumer’s
attention. According to our survey, as the chart below shows, 50% of respondents considered
that they could create smartphone ad experiences that do justice to their brands, compared to
20% who disagreed.

Figure 2: ‘We can create smartphone ad experiences that do justice to our brand’
– agree or disagree

5%
16%
15%

34%
30%

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Somewhat disagree Strongly disagree

Respondents: 100

 Programmatic direct and workflow automation: One of the barriers to programmatic

branding has been the absence of quality inventory available in programmatic channels.
While appropriate for pure audience targeting, where placement is a secondary consideration,
equity advertising depends on context and brand association to drive upper funnel
engagement and impact brand sentiment.

Until recently, networks and exchanges had little to offer marketers who wanted close control
over the sites, apps and other addressable channels their ads would appear on. Today, Deal ID
and private marketplace functionality are enabling brands to create direct inventory
connections in biddable environments. Also, new programmatic direct technologies and
marketplaces are providing automation that streamlines the once paper-driven, manual
process of inventory procurement. Advances in both methodologies are driving adoption of
programmatic branding by giving marketers granular control over their marketing
investments. We expect this trend to continue, especially with the adoption of standards and
protocols, such as the recent OpenDirect 1.0 standard released by the IAB.

 Video: It would be hard to overstate the importance of video for achieving programmatic
branding at scale. Firstly, video has been shown to drive the highest levels of upper-funnel
engagement, in terms of storytelling and creating emotions. Secondly, video represents the
purest of native ad formats (the 15 and 30-second spot). Thirdly, video is almost the perfect

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 6

Certainly, marketers must gain a competency in accessing quality video in programmatic

channels and tailor brand messages to be appealing in shorter, more ‘snackable’ increments
that map to reduced consumer attention spans, and differing outlets to be successful. Video is
a (if not the) key component to implementing a successful programmatic branding strategy.

This conclusion correlates to the findings in our survey: 58% of respondents believe they are
able to create engaging video content which, through programmatic, can be delivered to the
right audience.

Figure 3: ‘We can create engaging video content which will be delivered to the
right audience’ – agree or disagree

5%
4%
25%

33%

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Somewhat disagree Strongly disagree

Respondents: 100

 Measurement: Core to applying budget to nascent programmatic branding efforts is the

ability to measure success. Marketers must be proficient in both marketing execution
(delivering messages through programmatic channels) and also measurement (understanding
the impact of equity advertising using available KPI data). The former requires campaign
performance and reach data from multiple channels, and the latter requires the unification of
consumer identity data – often with the help of a data management platform (as below).

Key to this will be the unification of offline and online measurement, such as Nielsen seeks to
achieve with its ongoing multi-touch attribution (MTA) initiatives that blend panel and user-
level data. Programmatic branding will not scale without the right tools to measure brand lift
in the addressable market. New frameworks are needed – and being developed – which will
spur the adoption of programmatic tactics for equity advertising.

 Data: As with all addressable advertising, data remains the key ingredient to success. In the
case of programmatic branding, the role data plays starts with the unification of the consumer
with all of their devices – the cornerstone of one-to-one marketing. By leveraging cross-device
identity management (CDIM) techniques, programmatic marketers can control frequency of

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 7

1.1. Opinions about programmatic advertising

The chart below shows the extent to which senior marketers agree or disagree with a number of
statements relating to programmatic advertising (including statements already shown in pie
charts within the executive summary). Further findings from the survey are included throughout
the report.

Figure 4: Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with the following
statements.

We can create engaging video content

25% 33% 33% 4% 5%
which will be delivered to the right audience

There is a skills gap in the programmatic

24% 33% 35% 5% 3%
advertising industry

Effective multi-touch attribution is the key to

21% 32% 38% 8% 1%
further programmatic branding investment

Programmatic advertising is only good for

20% 31% 35% 10% 4%
direct response advertising

I have a good understanding of the benefits

20% 34% 26% 15% 5%
of programmatic brand advertising

By 2017 our programmatic direct spending

18% 27% 38% 11% 6%
will outstrip out real-time bidding spending

Programmatic advertising is ready for brand

18% 31% 41% 5% 5%
scale

We effectively integrate mobile into our

16% 37% 31% 12% 4%
programmatic branding campaigns

We can create smartphone ad experiences

16% 34% 30% 15% 5%
which do justice to our brand

Our programmatic direct spending outstrips

13% 33% 38% 11% 5%
real-time bidding budget

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Somewhat disagree Strongly disagree

Respondents: 100

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 8

Founded in 1999, Econsultancy has offices in New York, London and Singapore.

Econsultancy is used by over 600,000 professionals every month. Subscribers get access to
research, market data, best practice guides, case studies and elearning – all focused on helping
individuals and enterprises get better at digital.

The subscription is supported by digital transformation services including digital capability

programmes, training courses, skills assessments and audits. We train and develop thousands of
professionals each year as well as running events and networking that bring the Econsultancy
community together around the world.

Subscribe to Econsultancy today to accelerate your journey to digital excellence.

Call us to find out more:

 New York: +1 212 971 0630

 London: +44 207 269 1450
 Singapore: +65 6653 1911

Programmatic Marketing: Beyond RTB

https://econsultancy.com/reports/programmatic-marketing-beyond-rtb

Best Practices in Digital Display Advertising

http://econsultancy.com/reports/best-practices-in-digital-display-advertising

Best Practices in Data Management

http://econsultancy.com/reports/best-practices-in-data-management

Data Management Platforms Buyer’s Guide

http://econsultancy.com/reports/dmp-buyers-guide

1.3. About the author

Chris O’Hara is the author of four Econsultancy best practice guides – Best Practices in Digital
Display Advertising, Best Practices in Data Management, Programmatic Marketing: Beyond
RTB and The New Mobile Display Ecosystem, in addition to being a researcher and contributor
to Econsultancy’s Data Management Platforms Buyer’s Guide.

Chris is a well-known speaker at industry conferences and writes a monthly column about
programmatic marketing and ad technology in AdExchanger.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 9

Programmatic advertising represents the largest platform change for digital marketers since the
first banner ad appeared on the internet over 20 years ago. Performance advertisers have
primarily driven this growth. However, the tides are turning, as media budgets are no longer
distributed in siloes and consumers present brands with more opportunities to drive engagement,
programmatically. This report helps to highlight the ever-increasing use of programmatic
advertising for branding activities.

As an industry we know that programmatic works for branding campaigns. The emergence of
measurement solutions such as Nielsen’s Online Brand Effect (OBE) and Digital Ad Ratings
clearly indicate brand metrics can be measured accurately at scale. Industry figures indicate a
growth in brand advertising budget for the programmatic sector and a corresponding slowdown
in growth for more traditional channels such as TV.

The report highlights that 62% of marketers are already utilising programmatic for branding
objectives, not just direct response, with an expectation to increase programmatic spend by an
average 37% by 2017. This represents a huge opportunity for the industry to build targeting and
measurement solutions that deliver greater effectiveness and efficiency for upper-funnel
campaigns.

For programmatic branding to develop, the industry must focus on enabling better measurement
of brand advertising campaigns. Execution of programmatic campaigns is only one key aspect of
great online advertising with measurement being the second – a key ingredient for this will be
continuing to innovate in our use of data. Programmatic branding cannot scale without the right
tools to measure brand metrics.

Additionally, to lower the barriers to entry for advertisers and drive wider programmatic adoption
by brands, there is a need for education from the industry around the benefits, best practice and
ROI programmatic delivers. The industry at large must continue to improve upon its capabilities,
such as the ability to reduce costs and optimise in real time; identified by marketers in this report.

It is up to the industry to address every challenge from an execution and measurement

perspective, in order to realise the potential that lies ahead for brands in the programmatic space.
Programmatic branding is a proven solution and its future is bright.

Matt White
UK Managing Director
Quantcast

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 10

Quantcast is dedicated to making display as relevant and effective as search, and currently
delivers outstanding advertising campaigns for the world’s leading advertisers and publishers,
and brings accurate audience measurement to over 100 million digital destinations.

For more information please email [email protected]

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 11

Programmatic advertising is becoming increasingly appealing for marketers who want to increase
the success of their campaigns across a growing number of addressable channels, helping them to
target the right audiences more effectively in real time with the most relevant messaging. At the
same time, the growth of video and mobile within the display advertising ecosystem is fuelling the
growth of programmatic by opening up more possibilities for brand advertisers.

In this report, we also look at how the world’s most forward-looking marketers are leveraging ad
technology to deliver relevant, top-funnel messaging to targeted audiences, and how those efforts
are being measured against both online and offline results. The report focuses on innovation in
mobile and video channels, as well as the role first- and third-party data is playing in aligning
audiences with brands.

Finally, we’ll look at how marketers are measuring success, and what technologies they are using
to validate media investments, as more budget moves from traditional media channels to
addressable channels.

3.1. About this report

Despite years of innovation in digital advertising – from desktop display advertising to mobile
and beyond – brands are still hesitant to trust large brand budgets to digital. Scale is hard to
achieve, results are hard to measure, and there is a persistent fear of waste and fraud. Despite
this, consumers are turning their attention away from traditional channels, and spending more
time on desktop internet and mobile devices. Brands have been quick to embrace new digital
tactics, but are still wary of matching digital marketing investments with the places consumers are
spending time.

Programmatic Branding offers an unbiased perspective on what the largest consumer brands
think of digital marketing channels, how they are aligning their resources to apply messaging into
multiple digital channels, and how they are going to measure success. The report will answer
questions including:

 What is the current state of programmatic for branding?

 What are the most innovative companies doing to create digital brand messages?
 What are the best approaches to leveraging first-party data for branding?
 How are innovative marketers justifying top-funnel digital branding efforts?
 How soon will addressable television overtake TV?

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 12

Econsultancy would like to thank all those who contributed to this report.

Please see Section 10 of this report for biographies of contributors.

3.3. Methodology
This report aims to provide an unbiased, balanced look at digital branding through programmatic
channels, aided by leading practitioners in the space. As well as a survey of senior-level digital
marketers (see below), the author interviewed senior-level digital media and ad technology
executives who provided detailed responses to a wide range of questions.

In addition, the author conducted extensive interviews with programmatic thought leaders and
drew upon his own previously conducted research. The opinions in this report are the author’s
own and may not reflect the views of his employer or companies in which he holds equity.

This report also includes the results from an April 2015 survey conducted among 117 senior-level
marketers (CMOs, VPs of marketing, marketing directors) from a wide range of industry verticals,
split equally between the United States and the United Kingdom. The quantitative survey results
supplement and validate the qualitative responses gathered from interviews. The chart below
shows the breakdown of respondents by business vertical.

Figure 5: How survey respondents were spread across sectors

Technology 13%
Professional Services 10%
Financial Services 10%
Charities, Government and Non Profit 9%
Travel & Leisure 8%
Retail 8%
Healthcare and Pharma 7%
Consumer Goods 7%
Manufacturing 5%
Automotive 5%
Telecoms 2%
Media 2%
Gaming and Gambling 2%
Other 14%

0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14% 16%

Respondents: 117

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 13

Marketers, who used to be able to capture consumer eyeballs at scale with streamlined linear
media purchases to build brands, and then ‘sweep up’ lower-funnel customers with direct
response tactics, have seen their methodologies collapse. The 100-year old AIDA (Attention,
Interest, Desire, Action) marketing funnel, easily understood and managed, no longer holds true
in a multi-device, multiple channel world. Rather, marketers must unpack a convoluted
‘consumer journey’ with multiple touchpoints. The classic ‘moment of truth’ in consumer
packaged goods marketing, the moment a consumer is deciding between Tide and Surf on the
store shelf, has been disintermediated by a mobile phone. Can’t decide? Text a friend, or read an
online review.

Over the past 20 years, marketers have also seen a gigantic ‘LUMAscape’ of data-driven
technologies companies enter the equation, bringing massive innovation – and disruption – to
marketing. Online marketing promised addressability and the measurement that comes along
with it. For marketers, the questions long asked, and only partially answered by surveys and
longitudinal studies, would finally be answered. What caused a consumer to view an ad, click it,
and convert from prospect to customer? What was the path to purchase that produced the most
desirable outcome?

Both buyers and sellers of digital media struggle with the complexity, as witnessed by low
margins. An agency study by AAAA cited that the cost of servicing digital campaigns averages
30% of an agency’s media cost, as opposed to 2% for television buys.1 A similar study of media
planning practices reveals that marketers spend between 8%-12% of their digital budgets just on
media planning, which take an average of 482 hours to complete.2 These inefficiencies had much
to do with creating auction-based approaches to media buying (real-time bidding), in which
today’s programmatic movement was born. Growth in RTB technologies, and widening adoption
of their use for audience segmentation and targeting over the past several years has now spurred
interest and investment in programmatic approaches to not just digital display inventory, but
content creation and optimisation, native ads, and even workflow and back-end processes.
Marketers want digital addressability, real-time analytics and granular levels of control – but
without the complexity that comes with it.

Programmatic’s first proving ground – bidded media accessed through ad exchanges – has shown
great promise. Despite its many drawbacks (predilection for fraud, lower inventory quality and
commoditised ad units), RTB is expected to soar to $15 billion in 2015, up from $4.25 billion in
2013. Those are huge numbers, and testament to the fact that marketers crave programmatic
access to audiences. Agencies are leveraging newfound programmatic technologies for their
trading desks and building defensible, technology-driven practices for their clients. Publishers are
slowly replacing third-party networks and exchange monetisation models, and leveraging data
management technology to programmatically connect their favoured advertisers directly to their
inventory. Venture-funded technology companies are still firmly ensconced between supply and
demand, and increasingly find new ways to take margins from media transactions.

1 https://ams.aaaa.org/eweb/upload/catalog/pdfs/mg18.pdf
2 http://www.nextmark.com/media-planning/digital-media-planning-workflow-calculator/

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 14

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2015
Several hundred companies arose to help marketers understand, segment and target online
audiences, create automation around inventory procurement and figure out results. Different
platforms for display, video and search advertising rose up, and various ‘management’ platforms
began to enable marketers to manage the inherent complexity. All of this built an online
marketing industry designed to leverage audience data to separate audience from media and
target likely buyers at scale. Before long, direct response online marketing was disrupting many
different traditional channels, stealing market share from TV and print, just like search
completely destroyed classified advertising.

But, even at current levels, with online display advertising capturing an increasing amount of total
annual spend, there are still billions of dollars in media spending dedicated to old fashioned print
and television. This gap, made famous by Kleiner Perkins analyst Mary Meeker, is the difference
between consumer time spent in media and the amount of marketing budget applied to the
channel. While the last several years have seen digital display finally catch up, an overwhelming
gap exists between the time people spend on their mobile devices and the amount of money
marketers are applying there. Filling this gap is the key to being able to leverage programmatic
technology to enable branding at scale.

Source: Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, based on data provided by the IAB and eMarketer.

This report explores how modern marketers are leveraging programmatic advertising pipes to go
beyond direct response advertising and drive upper-funnel engagement with consumers.

For inventory owners, this means being able to compete for rich television budgets. Publishers
that can deliver massive audiences across multiple devices, at scale with measureable results,
should be able to capture premium CPMs. Marketers, interested in inexpensive yet effective
cross-channel reach, want to benefit from an ‘always-on’ capability to reach audiences more
efficiently.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 15

Understanding how programmatic marketing has evolved really comes down to following the
money – understanding how technology has disintermediated inventory owners, and how
technology has evolved to take control back. The illustration above provides a simplified way of
thinking about the evolution in digital media over the last 20 years:

 Publisher direct: In the early days of digital, publishers placed ads directly (hardcoded) on
their site, or deployed ad serving technology that wasn’t connected to ad networks or
exchanges. They controlled 100% of their inventory and marketers used the publishers’
context (sports, finance, etc.) as a proxy for audience, similar to traditional media. Want to
reach pet owners? Target them on Doglovers.com. This model still exists today with premium
publisher inventory (i.e. homepage and index page content that usually commands higher
CPMs).

 The ad network era (1.0): As the internet scaled, publishers created a major problem.
Instead of creating scarcity of their inventory, they placed banner advertising on almost every
web page they created, in the interest of scaling digital revenue (mostly, to replace rapidly
declining print revenue). Early ad networks saw this problem and leveraged cookie-based
technology to create scaled audience buying. By placing architecture (tags) across multiple
publishers’ pages, and collecting behavioural and technographic signals, networks made it
possible to buy ‘moms’ across a wide range of sites. Marketers loved the scale and ‘one-stop
shopping’ for multiple-publisher buys, and publishers loved getting paid for inventory they
could not sell directly. The programmatic era was born.

 Network 2.0 / the DSP era: With all of the technology on the supply side, marketers were
starting to feel left out of an exciting opportunity to gain control over large-scale digital
marketing – and agencies were finding their 15% media planning commissions going to
technology players who suddenly understood audiences better than them. With new ad
exchanges being developed, full of long-tail publisher inventory, ad technology started to
emerge for agencies and marketers, offering them visibility into the long tail of the internet,
and bidding technologies to start valuing audiences more granularly – and using advanced
bidding technology to ‘win’ audience impressions. Suddenly, big agency trading desks were
deploying demand-side platforms (DSPs) to bid on exchange-based inventory, and the 15%
commissions were going back to them. Better still, some trading desks and exchanges took
positions in media, and successfully arbitraged those positions to make outsized profits. Older
networks (CPXi, Conversant – formerly ValueClick) started to employ these technologies to
supercharge their inventory and gain access to more demand.

 The data management platform (DMP) era / programmatic direct: Recently, the
advent of advanced data management technology has given publishers the tools to take back

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 16

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and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2015
their audience inventory from networks and exchanges, and gain their own audience selling
capabilities. Instead of depending on another company’s technology to distinguish between
the ‘soccer moms’ and ‘auto intenders’ on their owned and operated properties, publishers
have deployed so-called first-party DMPs, which enable them to build and activate audience
segments. DMPs give them the control to price and place these segments in DSPs, and share
them directly with demand-side partners in a data-secure way. Publishers are steadily
leveraging DMP technology to decrease their dependence on networks and exchanges, and
have more direct relationships (and integrations) with demand-side platforms.

Another key technology that has recently come into play has been programmatic direct
technology, which enables publishers to automate the way demand-side customers access
their inventory. By bypassing the manual process of securing media through the RFP and
insertion order process, programmatic direct technology such as iSocket, ShinyAds (both
acquired recently by Rubicon Project) and AdSlot are giving publishers the ability to create
programmatic access to premium inventory normally hidden behind a sales team.

This also includes functionality inside of current demand-side platforms, such as DealID and
private marketplaces, which leverage programmatic pipes for deal execution, but offer a
strong layer of deal control, which enables supply- and demand-side partners to buy fixed-
price inventory with rules around guarantees and delivery.

 Automated guaranteed / total automation: Demand-side technology, such as that

offered by Bionic Advertising Systems and Centro, is enabling agencies to opt out of Excel-
heavy planning methodologies and start building and tracking media plans with cloud-based
architecture. This is the start of the ‘automated guaranteed’ movement. Automated
guaranteed systems along with groups like the IAB are building the standards and protocols
to make securing inventory through a system seamless. This involves setting a common
taxonomy for deal points, setting standards around the way dates and prices are coded, and
countless other details that ensure two machines can communicate. Early work involving
companies including Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Yieldex, MediaMath and Bionic Advertising
Systems produced the OpenDirect 1.0 standard3.

Taking this a step further, newer technologies and older demand-side systems are evolving to
create web-based systems that that procure audiences and inventory across all addressable
channels, including display, mobile, video, addressable television, digital out-of-home, email and
more. The future of media will belong to new systems where audiences can be discovered, valued
and transacted upon in an open marketplace, akin to a financial commodities exchange.

4.2. Is programmatic ready for brand scale?

Although we have yet to fully enter the ‘programmatic direct’ or ‘total automation’ era as
described above, the transformational change that has been happening in marketing is here to
stay. Daniel McGuire, the founder and CEO of Skinnyprice, a programmatic pricing engine for
ecommerce, likens the evolution we are seeing to television:

“There is a change slowly happening that mirrors what happened to the music industry.
With the advent of the internet and new technology, the traditional music industry
(selling CDs) went through a drastic change. Napster and free downloads later moved
to iTunes’ dollar downloads with advent of security and ease. Then things moved to
Pandora’s free/ad-based or subscription model – and finally we have Spotify with
unlimited music downloads for a small monthly subscription fee.”

McGuire applies this to the television market, where ad-supported broadcast continues to be
disrupted by cable, and then ‘cable cutters’ with subscription services such as Hulu and Netflix.

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Christopher Skinner, Managing Director of MakeBuzz, takes a different view, explaining that the
current measurement tools available to programmatic marketers do not provide an adequate
framework to be effective. Skinner argues that a different methodology is needed – namely, tying
success to profitability outcomes:

“The right tools will tie brand media impressions to company profitability. Right now,
digital is too concerned with tracking every last event and calling it ‘attribution’. But
they haven’t accepted that much of what occurs as a result of brand media occurs in the
real world.”

The table stakes in this new type of measurement are what Skinner calls ‘macro tools’ that can
measure a total shift in holistic performance, a result of investment in branding:

“Some companies are starting to make inroads into this space, such as LiveRamp,
Drawbridge, Merkle (and my own company, MakeBuzz) and a few others but the
additions are too great to change the game at scale.”

These companies are taking offline CRM and profitability data, and building custom frameworks
that enable more bespoke measurement points, often relying on benchmark data specific to sales
by region.

Taking this a step further, Skinner posits that marketers are not leveraging enough volume
through programmatic, and opting for media of lower quality – factors that make the
programmatic branding thesis tough to justify in early days. After analysing a large set of
aggregated programmatic campaign data, Skinner sees less than desirable results:

“Less than 10% of the media can be attributed to conversion. Less than 30% of media
shows above average KPIs. That means my media buy is 10x the actual cost.”

Clearly, in order for programmatic branding to achieve success, brand messages must go beyond
bidding on low cost exchanges and media volumes must achieve greater gross rating points
(GRPs) to emulate the impact of successful linear campaigns.

It goes without saying that the ‘pipes’ that have been laid down over the last 20 years have had an
enormous impact on direct response (DR) marketing, and will continue to help advertisers
connect with consumers at the end purchase stage. Real-time bidding, dynamic media creative,
dynamically-generated content on landing pages and measurement technologies have forever
altered the media investment landscape. Yet marketers struggle to apply the same concepts and
measurements to upper-funnel activity.

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Figure 6: Does your company run programmatic advertising campaigns

specifically for branding objectives (as opposed to direct response objectives)?

39%

62%

Yes No

Respondents: 117

Not all marketers have been able to make the full-fledged leap into branded programmatic,
though. Bonnie Jackson, who runs digital display at B&Q, Europe’s largest home improvement
group, sees programmatic DR campaigns as a natural complement to the upper-funnel branding
efforts in traditional media:

“We’re combining [the programmatic] approach with traditional media buys that are
more upper-funnel and… testing [some buys] against programmatic alternatives. The
reason why we haven’t used [programmatic] for branding to date is that we’re still very
early on in our programmatic journey and have been focusing on the key benefits of
optimising towards KPIs such as ROI and leads in our early tests.”

This is a common refrain among the marketers involved in our research. Until the establishment
of clear measurement and ROI metrics, most brands are unwilling to dedicate large amounts of
branding investment into the digital channel, citing lack of visibility into performance.
Essentially, the brand marketer has been measuring the results of investments into linear
television, radio and print as sales. Over time, an understanding of relative returns against the
broader portfolio of media investments creates predictability in sales, especially where
investments can be mapped geographically. Although such measurement is directional at best, it
is still part of an existing framework that is understood at the enterprise level. Without such a
framework, moving brand budget into programmatic channels not only requires new technology
and measurement – but internal advocacy and risk taking.

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Figure 7: What is preventing investment or further investment in programmatic

advertising for branding?

Data privacy concerns 23%

Difficulty proving return on investment 23%

Lack of good quality data 18%

Complexity of marketplace 17%

Lack of transparency 16%

Lack of know-how 14%

Measuring engagement and brand uplift 14%

Brand safety issues 13%

Ad fraud 12%

Lack of trust in agency 12%

Concern about viewability of ads 12%

Difficulty achieving scale and reach online 9%

Using standardised offline measurement for
6%
online campaigns
Vested interests in traditional advertising 6%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

Respondents: 104

From the agency perspective, working to get brands comfortable with programmatic
opportunities starts with creating awareness of what automation can do, followed by developing
best practices. For VivaKi’s Head of Platform in EMEA, Danny Hopwood, that means both
educating marketers on programmatic and ensuring they have a level of comfort around brand
safety – and also educating publishers on how brands want to access their inventory. “Agencies
have a history of working with big brands which leads to a naturally cautious approach when it
comes to brand safety,” says Hopwood.

This means programmatic access to higher quality inventory is a prerequisite for making
programmatic branding happen: “In 2015 we are already seeing big publishers like Channel 4
put their most premium supply into a programmatic trade for agencies to buy. This is down to
both buyers (agencies) and sellers (publishers) understanding that to trade effectively you need
both sides on the same page to ensure we are all joined-up and approaching this
collaboratively.”

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To achieve programmatic branding truly requires disruption within the marketing organisation,
across multiple dimensions:

 People-first orientation
The most critical shift needed within a marketing organisation is to understand that, to
achieve success in the digital world, you have to turn to the past. Before marketing became so
‘addressable’, the company’s most valuable possession was its database of customers. The
CRM system stored prospects and customers, associated them with groups and enabled them
to be activated and analysed.

The only thing that has changed in the programmatic world is that we see those consumers as
cookies (or unique IDs), and those groups as segments. Companies who are truly leaning in
must commit to understanding their prospects at the individual level and match their offline
data with online user data to ensure that the basis of their efforts has validity (e.g. being able
to connect all of their marketing activities to distinct users to ensure proper targeting and
measurement). The individual is the coin of the realm in today’s data-driven marketing
landscape, and the currency that unlocks success.

 Elimination of silos
Branding campaigns must work across the entire media mix model and therefore impact
various parts of the marketing – and larger – organisation. Because the consumer is impacted
by brand messaging throughout the path to purchase, brand ads have an impact on direct
marketing, content marketing and even search. More sophisticated marketers try and unify
and report on multiple channels, creating attribution models that take disparate marketing
inputs into account.

But, more often than not, the search marketer or agency is not looking at brand activity and
performing lift studies that take linear television or branded online video into account.
Programmatic enables the organisation, through the use of consumer data, to attribute value
across various channels, and start connecting the various marketing silos. Moreover, having
actionable cross-channel data helps other parts of the organisation (product, manufacturing
etc.) get insights into customer sentiment and answer key questions. How is seasonality
driven by consumer attitudes about the brand? What product attributes or features are
driving purchase intent? When advertising is more measureable, its outputs become data that
can drive deeper insights across the entire value chain.

 Culture of knowledge sharing and data-driven decision-making

As in the above, programmatic branding and its outputs of actionable datasets can start to
drive collaboration within an enterprise. For example, say an auto manufacturer is marketing
a new model of car and wants to understand what features are most important and will drive
sales. This question can be answered in user focus groups, but can be enhanced with
marketing response data. If the advertiser plans four different test campaigns with the same
messaging, but different creative focused on four distinct new attributes (i.e. safety,

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 Creative leads the way

Ironically, with all of the data programmatic branding initiatives create, the biggest impact on
results will not come from better segmentation, targeting or media mix modelling – but from
the creative. Branding is, above all, about telling great stories and creating the ‘attention,
interest and desire’ in the upper funnel. That work is more measurable than ever, but you still
can’t ‘plug into’ the way a great ad makes a consumer feel. What programmatic data can offer
are deep insights into which audience segments responded best to which creatives, how time
of data and other factors impacted results and how content adjacency drove (or decreased)
impact.

Programmatic is about the rapid delivery, testing and optimisation of creative messages. This
can range from dynamically matching colours, images and text to pre-selected audience types
(ad delivery in real time) to the programmatic creation of ads. Currently, there are firms
helping marketers leverage facial recognition data to understand consumers’ reactions to
creative. How long before webcams understand our moods and deliver ‘emotionally-targeted’
advertising?

While some of these tactics are in the nascent stage, advanced marketers understand that the
programmatic infrastructure currently being built supports marketing tactics that have yet to
exist. Big data pipes are collapsing silos, bringing actionable insights and driving new possibilities
for marketers – and the innovation is just beginning. Will marketers gain a competitive advantage
from leveraging data-driven audience marketing? Yes, but at what cost?

For many marketers, the step-function increase in organisational change required to truly pivot to
a data-led organisation is too steep a price to elicit, especially in larger organisations that live and
die by quarterly numbers. So, how can the average marketing organisation make the shift to a
programmatically-driven group that puts a premium upon data-derived insights?

For Tom Chavez, CEO of data management platform Krux, making the shift to a data-led
organisation starts with understanding customers on a more granular level:

“The advent of big data technology isn’t just about collecting and centralising lots of
data. It’s not even about activating audience data for marketing. More specifically, it is
about ‘people data’. Who are my customers, how can I match them across various
devices, and what can I understand about them to get a 360-degree view of who they
are?”

Being able to map consumers on an individual level is what enables not only better targeting, but
also reliable attribution.

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Figure 8: What do you see as the benefits of running programmatic brand

advertising campaigns?

Increased efficiency 64% 33% 3%

Reduced overall advertising costs 58% 36% 6%

Ability to optimise and target the right
56% 36% 8%
audience in real time
Opportunity to leverage first-party data 52% 32% 15%

Higher return on investment 52% 44% 5%

Ability to build effective cross-device
49% 45% 6%
campaigns
Greater data and insights to understand my
49% 42% 9%
customer
Ability to achieve scale 48% 45% 8%

Reduced time to launch campaigns 45% 51% 5%

Opportunity to leverage third-party data 45% 40% 15%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Major benefit Minor benefit No benefit

Respondents: 66

4.4. The real-time nature of modern marketing

Beyond more accurate measurement is the notion that today’s programmatic marketing – not just
limited to display – can be executed in real time. In other words, digital tools can give marketers
the ability to deliver the right message, at the right place and an exact time – with all the data
available to them. This is certainly a big data challenge, both from a data ingestion perspective
(data in) and a data activation perspective (data out).

While we have explored the beginning of real-time decisioning with digital display RTB systems –
rendering ad decisions in milliseconds – we are just starting to enable this on a cross-channel
basis, enabling ad sequencing and audience-based bid decisioning across multiple channels,
including mobile. For BrightRoll’s Léon Siotis, this is table stakes in the larger game of
programmatic branding:

“The combination of speed and decision-making intelligence across the programmatic

value chain is critical. A missed bid equals a missed opportunity and missed profit –
that’s fact on any trading exchange. For a programmatic execution to be successful, it’s
crucial that every trade happens as quickly as possible, and that they are based on
intelligent decisions. The intelligence that can be gained from mobile – for example
knowing exactly where a customer is and what sites they have visited – can arm brands
and advertisers with far greater insight into their target audiences. Real-time

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However, gaining expertise in programmatic marketing is not just an execution game, relying
upon real-time ad decisioning siloed in various channels. For Krux’s Tom Chavez, the challenge
for real-time enabling programmatic marketing goes beyond building an execution layer in search
or display advertising that can deliver quickly:

“In order to truly execute on the vision of real-time programmatic branding, you need
technology architected from the ground up around a cloud computing model that will be
able to scale infinitely. Many systems built more than five years ago lack the ability to
ingest highly differentiated data and scale in accordance with growth in data type and
volume.”

Moreover, using data to drive audience-targeting decisions, insights and forecasting also requires
more advanced data management. First generation of data management platforms cannot be used
for programmatic branding at scale due to the fact that the ability to query data is limited to pre-
defined queries and longer data collection cycles, dependent largely on online cookie gathering.
According to Chavez, “second-generation DMPs solve the speed and flexibility problem because
they’re architected around the principle of ‘completeness’. Complete big data architectures
capture all of the data in anticipation of the questions you haven’t yet asked. They provide an
ever-expanding reservoir of data you can tap at any time to create new hypotheses, build new
theories of the consumer or infer new results.”

What percentage of total brand spending (all channels) will go programmatic in

five years?
“Everything that can, will. As long as the true effects are being understood and recognised, that spend increases
as it becomes easier to purchase. If we can layer in two critical factors – the ability to target precisely and the
ability to verify and validate the media – it will gain even more traction.”
Christopher Skinner, MakeBuzz
“[We] firmly believe that programmatic is the modern way to buy media and, therefore, ‘everything’ will go
programmatic in that five-year timeframe to one degree or another – from automated and computer-driven
procurement to true buy-side decisioning at the moment of the impression. From a marketer’s point of view,
there’s no part of the paid media plan that can’t benefit from the application of these techniques. The only
countervailing force will be a certain pool of inventory where the sell side is able to maintain old ways of bringing
that inventory to market.”
Eric Picard, MediaMath
“We are already seeing clients asking for the majority of their brand activity to be run programmatically. P&G
stated it aims to buy 70% of digital ads programmatically. The IAB also predicted programmatic would account
for 46% of display in 2014, including video and mobile, up from 28% in 2013. So your guess is as good as mine,
but one thing is for certain and that is it’s only going in one direction – up.”
Danny Hopwood, VivaKi
“Seventy percent.”
Daniel McGuire, Skinnyprice
“33% of total branding spending (all channels) will go ‘programmatic’ in five years, with 90% of digital brand
spending being programmatic in five years. Of the digital brand spending, 67% will be RTB.”
William Lederer

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What percentage of total brand spending (all channels) will go programmatic in
five years?
“If we were simply talking about automating the pipes, I think that you will see as much as 50% of all media
traded ‘programmatically’ where that definition of programmatic is simply automation of the pipes. When
looking at RTB and private marketplaces, the decisioning done by SSPs and DSPs is a critical intelligence layer
that currently does not exist outside of the real-time bidding environment. If I was to be asked how much media
would be traded under the ‘intelligence layer’ definition of programmatic in the next five years, I would have to
respond that no more than 25% would be done so at that time. I know this is a bit convoluted but it depends on
what the definition of programmatic is.”

Amihai Ulman, Mass Exchange

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“There is a lot of tech jargon that surrounds ‘programmatic’ – but in essence it is the
application of data and technology to enable advertisers to target their ads at specific
audiences, wherever they are online… ‘Programmatic’ and ‘RTB’ are often used
interchangeably – which can be confusing. RTB is one way in which the price is
determined of reaching a specific audience with a specific piece of inventory i.e. via a
real-time auction conducted programmatically. However, inventory can also be bought
in advance and the price may be determined in advance.”

The future state of marketing is an omnichannel vision, where all consumer touchpoints can be
reached and measured programmatically – an always-on ability to reach the connected consumer
across multiple touchpoints. Of course, today’s reality is that consumers can be reached
programmatically across digital channels – with great difficulty and data management
investment.

According to Tom Speck, Global Display Manager for British Airways: “To us, omnichannel is
about being present where the consumer is with relevant messaging at every step of the journey,
from their initial research phase through to driving the conversion. It is about having a
presence at every touchpoint to achieve a range of objectives through a channel-agnostic
approach to campaign and media planning”.

Omnichannel approaches go beyond paid media to include earned (social activity, PR) and owned
(websites and apps) channels. A good example would be an always-on campaign for a bank’s
high-end credit card, in which the target was an affluent consumer. With the right data
management platform connecting the bank to its execution partners, omnichannel becomes
reality. Audience segments would be defined initially (credit score exceeding 740, plus available
bank balance above $25,000) and those online audiences would be targeted across display, video
and mobile channels. After an initial group of display impressions, those same consumers could
be targeted via email to reinforce the message, re-targeted later on display channels, and even
eventually contacted a few days later with postal mail. In the background, ongoing search
marketing and paid social posts would help convert deeper funnel prospects.

This is happening today, aided by more sophisticated dynamic technologies that enable different
messaging, both within creative and on-site, based on known audience attributes.

For Eric Picard, the omnichannel vision is just that: “a commitment to marketing across
channels to a flow of dollars that can move and follow the consumer across channels in pursuit
of ROI.”

The flexibility, addressability and measurability of programmatic will continue to drive this
omnichannel vision and make it a necessity for all marketers. As LUMA Partners banker Terence
Kawaja said nearly four years ago, “there’s no way you can go back to old options now [that we
have] the nirvana of ‘sciencified’ media.” That’s increasingly true today, with four more years of
tool development and data growth. Although today, programmatic use cases still revolve around
RTB – specifically audience targeting through exchanges – tomorrow’s programmatic toolset will
expand to include more cross-channel capabilities, and go beyond targeting to the true
omnichannel vision.

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5.1. Programmatic direct and workflow automation

Despite almost continuous hype and billions in investment in programmatic ad technology
companies, in 2014 only 4% of $10 billion digital display dollars spent in the US flowed through
programmatic direct channels.

Source: LUMA Partners, using eMarketer data, believes that growth in non-RTB programmatic will
expand from 4% in 2014 to over 25% of all display spending by 2016… massive growth.

Both buyers and sellers of digital media struggle with the complexity involved in digital media
transactions – planners can easily spend hours manually sorting through available inventory and
discovering prices to begin negotiating deals with the sellers or publishers; and publishers
compete for these sales in a cumbersome, highly manual agency-created RFP process that keeps
them at arms-length from advertisers.

This has started to impact the way marketers procure digital inventory. Recent research from the
programmatic platform Index Exchange shows marketers are taking a more active role by
controlling their programmatic budgets in-house. This is also seen in our survey results, where
over 41% of respondents reported running programmatic advertising campaigns in-house (Figure
9).

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 27

45%
41%
40%

35%

30%
24%
25%
21%
20%
14%
15%

10%

0%
In-house Through our agency A mixture of in-house We don’t run
and agency programmatic
advertising
campaigns

Respondents: 100

These inefficiencies (in the procurement of inventory) – coupled with the exponentially
increasing amount of inventory to be transacted online – helped create auction-based approaches
to media buying (real-time bidding), in which today’s programmatic movement was born. These
new methods for transacting media rely heavily on technology and data to efficiently – and often
automatically – manage the cumbersome work of digital media sales.

Growth in RTB technologies and widening adoption of their use for audience segmentation and
targeting over the past several years has now spurred interest and investment in programmatic
approaches to not just digital display inventory, but content creation and optimisation, and even
workflow and back-end processes. In short, marketers see the potential to leverage digital
addressability, real-time analytics and granular levels of control to achieve their business and
customer engagement objectives – and do so without the complexity that had previously been
inherent.

Considering the complexity of digital media, the variety of creative sizes, millions of ad-supported
sites and dozens of ad servers, analytics platforms, order management and billing tools, it goes
without saying that digital marketing is a hard competency for any organisation to master. On the
demand side, advertisers have gone from managing the relatively limited number of media outlets
offered by TV, print and radio to a digital channel with literally thousands of choices. Publishers,
facing a marketplace oversaturated with display inventory and a cumbersome workflow system,
have had to become experts in technology and yield management to realise the most revenue from
their readership.

For both sides, RTB systems offered a way to buy and sell inventory via a web-based interface,
rather than via email or over the phone. From the start, advertisers realised the benefits that data-
driven audience targeting brought, enabling specific audience segments to be found across ad
exchanges – the major transaction platform for programmatic – rather than by purchasing
contextually relevant content, or those whose visitor logs index highly against a desired

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Most marketers have embraced programmatic RTB vigorously for lower-funnel marketing activity
such as retargeting, enjoying the ability to cherry-pick segmented audience members without
making large spending commitments, and have come to expect the kind of robust analytics that
programmatic RTB platforms provide. The pipes have been laid to transact bidded media in near
real time, and there is a seemingly endless amount of third-party data and an ocean of exchange-
based inventory upon which to place targeted media. Programmatic RTB works, is growing and is
here to stay.

That said, there is a reason why programmatic RTB has attracted more direct response dollars
than ‘branding’ dollars, and that is largely down to the lack of quality inventory. Yet, marketers
surveyed are still applying, on average, 40% of programmatic spend on branding campaigns:

Figure 10: What proportion of your programmatic advertising spend is focused

on branding campaigns rather than direct response?

1-10% 9%

11-20% 14%

21-30% 15%

31-40% 19%

41-50% 15%

51-60% 6%

61-70% 6%

71-80% 12%

81-90% 3%

91-100% 0%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20%

Respondents: 65

Publishers, afraid of data leakage and desirous of control over pricing and availability of top-tier
inventory, have been unwilling to contribute premium inventory to exchanges. The most coveted
placements must still be purchased via manual insertion order, and the transactional layer of
inventory still commands the lion’s share of digital display budgets.

Make no mistake about it: there is a race to build technology that can provide programmatic
access to higher classes of inventory, and everyone from small software startups to large service
companies and well-funded leaders in programmatic RTB are looking to get in on the action. But
how will digital marketing automation be accomplished: through new web-based programmatic
direct software built from the ground up, or by leveraging existing technologies and building
features atop today’s programmatic RTB systems?

Also, what side of the transaction will be most influential in creating the standards and protocols
needed to make programmatic direct buying operate at scale: inventory owners, or marketers and

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What is the dream of a programmatic direct future? The day when a media planner can log into a
system, discover inventory, create an order for a guaranteed amount of impressions, deliver that
order electronically to a publisher who can press an ‘accept’ button and transmit that order
through to his ad server. It’s a one-to-one transaction that eliminates thousands of keystrokes,
dozens of spreadsheets, hundreds of emails and even the occasional fax. It is also a future that
both inventory buyers and sellers have desired since the first banner ad was sold nearly 20 years
ago, and today an entire industry is hard at work trying to deliver.

For Mass Exchange’s Amihai Ulman, the future is not about the executional layer of
programmatic (i.e. the pipes and systems that bid and deliver media in real time), but rather
about the way media across all channels is bought and sold:

“Newer technologies and older demand-side systems are evolving to create web-based
systems that procure audiences and inventory across all addressable channels,
including display, mobile, video, addressable television, digital out-of-home, email and
more. The future of media will belong to new systems where audiences can be
discovered, valued and transacted upon in an open marketplace, akin to a financial
commodities exchange.”

In this future, media procurement systems become more like financial exchanges, wherein
systems are agnostic, and filled with “buy and sell orders, rather than inventory”. With such a
system, it would be possible for media buyers to enter audience attributes and discover and
acquire a portfolio of inventory across addressable channels – and also resell those orders in a
liquid marketplace. This would enable inventory owners to understand real, market-based value
of their inventory (based on buy orders), enable marketers to take positions in inventory and
resell it within the exchange. Such an exchange would represent a revolution in media
procurement, rather than an evolution of current biddable environments.

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Figure 11: By 2017 by how much do you think your will have increased your
programmatic advertising spend for branding campaigns?

1-10% 14%

11-20% 8%

21-30% 23%

31-40% 22%

41-50% 8%

51-60% 9%

61-70% 6%

71-80% 6%

81-90% 5%

91-100% 0%

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25%

Respondents: 65

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 31

That means advertisers must understand what device consumers are interacting with, the utility
of the device and related application and how to deliver the contextually appropriate message in
near real time. That’s a lot of moving parts, but also an enormous opportunity for brands and ad
technology companies. In particular, the rise of media consumption on tablets – in conjunction
with television viewing is making it difficult for marketers to break their tactics into easily
addressable silos. More and more, people are depending on mobile devices to amplify their
viewing experiences, and marketers are struggling to connect devices with consumers and their
consumption habits.

Data convergence around multiple screens is just one of the many challenges created by mobile
for marketers, ad tech providers and content owners to consider. From a marketing perspective,
one of the bigger problems is the increasing shift to a world where the traditional sales funnel is
not as relevant. The proliferation of screens means that marketers have to reach people along
their ‘consumer journey’. It’s no longer a trip down the sales funnel, but a twisting landscape
where the consumer pushes marketers’ information through various social interactions.

The smart advertiser has to be ready at the drop of a hat to deliver perfect, personalised messages
into the consumer’s smartphone at the ‘moment of truth’ before a purchase – and, at the very
least, be prepared for various social media moments that can create earned media at scale. If this
sounds like a confusing paradigm shift for marketers with long-established customer engagement
methodologies, that’s because it is. Understanding how you assign attribution for all of the
various interactions a consumer has with a brand before purchase (a Facebook comment, a tweet,
a banner ad view or an email open) is the largest problem in a world where many consumers
interact with two or more connected devices.

According to the IAB UK’s Digital Ad Spend Report released in October 2014, mobile
programmatic has exploded in the UK, growing almost 200% to £63.9 million – making it “the
fastest growing digital ad format, accounting for £1 in every £5 spent on internet and mobile
display ads”. This profound growth has proven out the thesis that brands can effectively leverage
new screens to create an impact in upper funnel consumers.

Léon Siotis, Senior Director of Media & Publisher Development at BrightRoll, sees two key
benefits. Firstly, programmatic mobile ensures that advertisers keep pace with consumers as they
migrate to new screens:

“Brands simply cannot afford to ignore the areas where their audiences are paying
increasing amounts of attention. This attention is now split across multiple screens and
a single programmatic campaign can target and optimise against desired audiences in
a holistic and unified fashion.”

Secondly, the transition to the programmatic environment for brand marketers offers a real-time
understanding of consumer behaviour and sentiment:

The primary use case is the ability for marketers to test and measure reaction to create against
specific audiences in real time, and to be able to quickly optimise and adjust messaging to reflect
those attitudes. When you compare this dynamic to the recent past – in which a ‘miss’ on a huge
national television campaign offered almost no second chance for success, the benefits are clear.

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Over the last 15 years, ad technology has been focused and built around targeting using cookies, a
data currency that’s not applicable to mobile. Cookies enable marketers to rapidly identify and bid
on users in real time. Having this universally accepted technology has been transformative,
enabling marketers to effectively separate audience from media, and created an entire digital ad
technology ecosystem with data providers, ad exchanges, networks, creative optimisation and
audience analytics companies. Without the glue of the web browser, mobile data is siloed across
organisations. Telecom companies like Verizon and AT&T have it, large software companies like
Facebook and Google have it, and companies that make both software and devices have it also
(like Apple, Amazon and Samsung). Obviously, these companies have a distinct advantage when it
comes to building customer profiles. This is critical when it comes to implementing true one-to-
one marketing at scale, and we are starting to see large publisher coalitions and data cooperatives
built to offer an alternative to the ‘walled gardens’ of the internet where user identity can be
matched across devices.

Yet there are other avenues that can connect programmatic brand marketers with their audience.
For Affinity Answers’ Sree Nagarajan, a user ID is not the only avenue for audience discovery:

“With social affinity data, the best brand placements/advertisements for that content
are a powerful signal for targeting. This does not need a persistent or probabilistic ID.
For example, someone who is a fan of Ford Trucks, who have high mutual affinity with
Pawn Stars, will find messaging or content related to or placed near the show,
compelling, regardless of device. Of course, in the interest of users’ privacy, a
probabilistic ID along with affinity information could be considered a great middle
ground.”

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 33

For Alex Tait, in charge of such matters for consumer product brand Kellogg’s, the initial problem
is defining, exactly, what video means within the larger marketing organisation:

“Defining TV here as non-VOD (video on demand) and online video I’d state it
absolutely can and I’d be surprised if there are any major brands not using display and
increasingly VOD and online video for upper-funnel campaigns.”

For consumer products brands, more interested in driving in-store sales than web activity, the
dynamic is pure branding – at extreme digital scale. But while the majority of reach advertising is
still done through linear channels like television, more progressive marketers are starting to be
able to leverage new measurement techniques to justify mass reach campaigns online. Kellogg’s
Tait says:

“To do this, reach and frequency are often key metrics and, if you have the budgets
required, TV as a media is still a great way to achieve this with a strong ROI if planned
and bought correctly. However, even in these instances digital should be used as a
complementary media and will deliver as high and in many cases higher ROIs and net
income. Optimisation and developments in targeting such as programmatic will only
accelerate this further.”

For MediaMath’s Eric Picard, today’s programmatic video opportunities are powerful – but
nascent:

“Digital, or online video, is important in at least two ways for the industry. It’s a
powerful marketing channel in its own right given the reach and frequency that we can
really deliver against a target audience even today. In addition, it offers the power of
sight, sound and motion.”

The key element of branding is getting an emotional response from the consumer – something
more possible with video, a format designed to tell a story. Yet, “we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact
that it’s the sandbox in which we’re all learning how to apply programmatic approaches to
video experiences,” remarks Picard, adding: “It’s also here that we’re building an apparatus
against the day in the future when more premium video experiences are addressable in this
way.”

But what about scale? Can marketers achieve success in the current video landscape? With
limited video inventory (as compared to display), as well as a perceived quality deficit (lots of cat
videos), marketers are concerned that programmatic video is more promise than reality. For
Sammy Austin, it comes down to scale:

“Video scale will improve as demand increases. As with display, the proliferation of
publishers offering their inventory programmatically dramatically increased over time
as more brands and advertisers bought into RTB, we’ll see the same shift with video.”

MediaMath’s Picard sees the future of online video being dependent upon technology’s ability to
bring efficiency and scale to the procurement process, align marketing needs at the audience
level, and feed back valuable data into the marketing decisioning loop:

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 34

For Bill Lederer, former CEO of Kantar Video, the current state of the online video channel
parallels the transformation we have seen in display (see Section 4.1 – The evolution of
programmatic media):

“Just as we have seen in display, video ad networks are in real trouble. With the advent
of emerging video and cross-channel programmatic technologies, the value of ad
networks to video buyers and sellers is diminishing. We should expect this space to
become very competitive.”

So what’s next? Lederer sees a future in which “online and mobile video, along with addressable
and OTT, is the new, improved TV”. This new paradigm envisions audiences that have greater
control over viewing experiences, and more control – and enhanced measurability and buying
efficiencies for the marketers.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 35

First, an extension of the traditional AIDA funnel into a more circular consumer journey has
become reality.

For marketers, it’s all about insights. Procter & Gamble (P&G) spends famously every year to
glean a deep understanding of why consumers choose between brand A and brand B at the store
shelf (and now, increasingly online). This has been called the ‘moment of truth’. Those insights
drive multiple millions of dollars in media investment to help move products off the shelves. In
the past (and currently, if we want to be honest with ourselves), the primary marketing
investments have been big-reach vehicles like print and television, as measured by media
effectiveness studies.

Yet, can panel-based research be effective in light of the explosion of devices and the shift in
consumer attention? While corollaries may be drawn, it seems clear that the disruption in
consumer attention has created the need for more granular measurement. This is where
companies like Nielsen have led innovation with multi-touch attribution (MTA) studies,
partnering with large publishers like Facebook, Yahoo and Google.

Connecting offline and online marketing inputs to get a more accurate measurement of media
impact is critical if marketers are going to keep shifting budgets from linear television and print
into new online channels. They need to justify spend, map media investments to purchase
behaviour and ultimately understand how activity in each channel drives performance (more on
this below).

When asked how branding success is measured, survey respondents were clear that campaigns’
primary objectives were to drive visits to owned-and-operated sites, and viewability. It seems
obvious that branding campaigns would be measured by such metrics, but the results also speak
to the lack of confidence in the programmatic ecosystem, where real (human) traffic and
viewability are not to be assumed.

How do we measure success in digital branding today?

“The digital industry is constrained by the success measures we’ve been using for far too long which are now
outdated – either last click / last ad or click-through rate. Branding campaigns, whether online or offline, are
upper-funnel campaigns with the objective of driving brand preference in some way. Unfortunately, with the
current measurement system still used by so many agencies and marketers, this activity is rarely measured as the
focus on performance has clouded the potential of digital branding. Even when campaigns are not measured by
an action or a conversion, many marketers are still relying on click-through rate as a measure of success.

“But let’s face it – how many of us see an ad online and click on it? Just as I don’t see a TV ad and rush out to buy
a new car at 9pm, or take out a new mobile phone contract, the objective of any form of advertising is to create an
impact to influence a consumer, drive preference and consideration. Softer metrics need to be used for branding
such as a lift in total visits to the website or a larger share of searches, positive sentiment or even an increase in
visitor/customer loyalty. Harder metrics like GRPs [Gross Rating Points] and viewability are also encouraging as
they will make brand campaigns accountable and more effective.”

Tina Wild, Head of Account Strategy, Quantcast

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 36

50%
45%
45% 43%

40%

35%

30% 28%
25%
25%

20%

15%

10%
5%
5%

0%
Traffic to site Viewability rate Brand uplift Accuracy rate Other
survey (through Digital
Ad Ratings /
ComScore vCE)

Respondents: 106

Today, the emergence of mobile screens has created a different dynamic, in which consumers
have information available to them in real time – what Google calls a ‘zero moment of truth’ in
which a mobile phone is between the consumer and the store shelf (or any purchase decision),
diminishing the power of the marketer to leverage brand affinity to impact the purchase funnel.

MakeBuzz’s Christopher Skinner explains that companies must digitally invest in the “complete
customer journey”, especially in early-stages (upper funnel) activity:

“Even today, most early-stage media has been left to traditional to influence and garner
the right attention. When digital can effectively play and be priced at the early stages of
the customer journey, we can talk about the ‘zero moment of truth’ effectively. That time
will come soon as traditional media struggles. It is possible that digital media as we
know it today is relegated to direct response, remarketing and late-stage activities.”

If the traditional AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) is not dead, it has transformed
rapidly over the last several years. For Skinnyprice’s Daniel McGuire, “it is not dead but has
morphed into a model which incorporates other aspects like search, evaluation, share and
love/hate, etc. In the end the consumer has input through reviews, comments, blogs… but this
can be used to your advantage if you’re sharp and know how to use it. Example: quickly
interacting with complaints on Twitter and turning negatives into positives. So marketers must
understand and embrace the interactions with their users.”

Moneysupermarket’s Sammy Austin believes the AIDA funnel still has a role to play, albeit one in
which a more holistic view of the marketing value chain is considered. The idea of engaging a
newly exposed consumer at top of the funnel, from ‘awareness to advocacy;, and nurturing lower-
funnel prospects is fundamental. That said, “targeting has become a lot more refined and we are
able to tailor our messaging based on previous interactions with customers… we are all aware
that consumers are becoming more savvy and more technically advanced, engaging with

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 37

This contributes to a ‘single view’ of the consumer, more detailed understanding of individual
behaviour across devices, and ultimately gets the marketer closer to the ‘right message, right
place, right time’ paradigm.

For many agencies, the advent of programmatic buying not only created new opportunities – but
also started to show media planners and buyers how simplistic and fragmented available
measurement technology and frameworks had become. For VivaKi’s Hopwood, centralisation
within programmatic led to key benefits for marketers, as well as created the appetite for
advanced modelling:

“Marketers can now activate a hefty amount of their spend via a single platform as
opposed to multiple, disconnected direct publisher buys or ad networks. So success is
still measured in the same way but in a much less fragmented way. This then opens the
door to pushing the measurement model further. Attribution is finally something that
can be achieved in a shared cookie/data space that isn’t split across disconnected buys.”

Hopwood goes on to say that marketers will continue to bring their own success criteria to
the table (CPA, CPC, LTV, etc.), making measurement somewhat subjective. However, it is
clear that agencies find platform consolidation a huge benefit when it comes to aligning
success metrics, and being able to develop a shared framework for measurement. Yet,
“measurement will not be solved overnight.”

8.1. Multi-touch attribution: key to programmatic

branding
In order to achieve statistically valid MTA results, marketers must be proficient in not only the
‘what’ of marketing execution (sites, channels, creatives, impressions, devices), but also the ‘who’
(which consumers saw the messages). The former requires campaign performance and reach data
from multiple channels, and the latter requires the unification of consumer identity data – often
with the help of a data management platform.

Multi-touch attribution can determine the effectiveness of both online and offline media exposure
on household purchases – the Holy Grail of marketing. Ever since the first banner ad launched 20
years ago, marketers have been obsessed with achieving precise measurement. How much media
investment, in which channels, drives how much behaviour – and sales activity? MediaMath
famously calls this the evolution from ‘mad men’ to ‘math men’ to describe the continual move
towards programmatic marketing. Multi-touch attribution is really where the ultimate vision
becomes realised.

So, what goes into an MTA study and what emerges from it? The inputs for MTA are several:
household purchase data (such as loyalty card data from multiple sources), consumer
segmentation data by household (unified offline data and online identity data, usually ‘onboarded’
by a matching provider like LiveRamp or Neustar), online exposure data, generally campaign
metrics at the identity level, and finally offline exposure data, mainly from television. These
inputs are modelled to determine the overall effectiveness of media investment at the household
level, which can be ‘sliced’ and analysed by different variables. How did households with children
respond to a certain number of exposures to television advertising plus multiple online display
impressions?

This type of modelling is helping CPG (consumer packaged goods) marketers shift budgets from
television and print into online, where reach is less expensive. Marketers like Kellogg’s have been
aggressively pushing the boundaries of this notion, and seeing success in the grocery store by
applying less budget to overall branding – yet achieving ever higher levels of exposure, through

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 38

8.2. Brand safety is a key part of measurability

Issues around measurability are seen to be part of the growing pains inherent in rapidly shifting
media investment into technology-driven channel growth, soon to be overcome. According to Bill
Lederer:

“Brand safety, ad fraud, viewability and user experience concerns represent the
necessary growth pains of emerging media channels. Nothing more. These issues are in
the process of being identified, measured, commodified, commoditised and
commercialised.

“There is simply too much money at risk for the industry not to solve for at scale and
move past these issues. The real question is: how much more and for how long will a
marketer pay a market premium for these minimum quality measures?”

Although some inroads have been made in RTB systems – mostly involving the management of
‘white’ and ‘black’ lists of URLs – marketers still struggle to feel comfortable with the level of
control offered in programmatic systems to ensure brand messages do not appear alongside
negative news, adult content or other unsavoury environments. Blacklists are difficult to maintain
in an environment in which new sites and content is added every day, and it is cumbersome and
expensive to read context in a scaled way that addresses real-time ad decisioning (i.e. answering
the question ‘is this page suitable for my ad’ millions of times a day, in under 35 milliseconds).

The larger issue for marketers, however, is around fraud and robotic traffic – areas in which
brand safety becomes an issue and waste becomes a key concern. In the new era of addressable,
measurable marketing, it seems ironic that more than half of all ads are not seen at all. Although
this is a function of both fraud and other factors, including page positioning, marketers must take
viewability into consideration when evaluating programmatic branding investments – especially
considering such deals are made based on impressions, rather than clicks or actions.

Recent guidance by the MRC has further defined the definition of viewability to create a
framework which marketers can leverage to receive apples-to-apples comparisons of brand equity
investments across the vendor landscape… adding yet another layer of complexity to solving the
programmatic branding puzzle.

4 http://digiday.com/brands/ruffles-digital/

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 39

For MoneySuperMarket’s Austin, these types of guidelines and measures are critical in order to
justify programmatic investment in equity advertising:

“Knowing that measures are in place to improve the issues we are currently facing
makes advertisers more confident when investing time and money in this space. This is
further supported through the success we can see through our options for brand safety
tools. We are in very early stages and with everything there will be limitations, being
open and honest will be key to alleviate mistrust and a lack of transparency when
overcoming these issues.”

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 40

In fact, you might say that in order to truly achieve programmatic branding at scale, a first-party
DMP is a fundamental requirement:

 CDIM: Cross-device identity management (or, alternatively, cross-device user identity –

CDUI) is the key to digital branding. Before true one-to-marketing with individuals can take
place, individuals must be identified. At the moment, a large majority of marketers are using
multiple systems that can identify individual cookies, based on devices. But very few can
connect the Joe Smith desktop user with the Joe Smith mobile app user. Unlocking the people
behind the machines is what can enable sequential messaging, universal frequency capping
and (most importantly) true cross-channel attribution.

 First-party data: Most publishers have reams of first-party data (mostly derived from site
visitation and site analytics data, but which can also include valuable registration data), but
many fail to leverage that data to create actionable audience segments. Marketers crave
buying audiences, but are willing to pay a great deal more for verified, properly segmented
audiences when they appear on premium content. The combination of contextual relevance,
clean and well-lit properties, and brand association are the three legs of digital brand
advertising. Again, this is where data management comes in – both for the publisher who can
leverage his own data to create audience opportunities on quality content, and the marketer,
who can find his own customers (or lookalike audiences) on the sites they tend to visit.

 Global frequency management: It has long been known that there is a certain frequency
of messaging needed to capture a consumer’s attention. Hit the prospect with too few
messages and brand recall is too low to create affinity and action. Broadcasting too many
messages risks alienation or, worse still, wilful ignorance of the advertiser. There is no perfect
frequency in any channel, but there are certainly guidelines.

Data management can leverage historical data to provide those guidelines. For example, a
marketer with 13 months of historical data may look back at four quarterly travel campaigns
aimed at moms and determine that showing moms a total of 100 ad impressions over 30 days
was the ideal frequency. Fewer than 100 were not ideal, but over 100 impressions tended to
have negligible impact. But marketers buying direct-to-publisher and using multiple
platforms (DSP, search, video DSP, etc.) can only control frequency within the individual
platform. Only a centralised system that can unify user identity and connect with those
systems in real time can keep a lid on cross-channel frequency. Can you achieve
programmatic branding without a DMP? Yes, but it costs a lot more and risks over-exposing
consumers to the brand.

 Next-level attribution modelling: At the end of the day, insights are what drive branding.
Marketers pour money into a marketing machine and the output is not just sales – but
understanding what drove those sales, motivated the consumer to purchase, what the
composition of those buyers were, where they were found, and how they reacted to various
offers. In the digital world, many years have passed where search – often the last place the
marketer can reliably ‘see’ the consumer before they take action – took the lion’s share of the
credit. Making sure paid search keywords are connected to the right links has made Google
one of the world’s most formidable companies. Yet, while marketers have continued to

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 41

Data management is playing a role in that by being able to capture activity at the user level,
and model the path to purchase against the paid, owned and earned measurable media that
the user encountered. Being able to flexibly author attribution models – deciding, for
example, how much a first exposure to a brand ad is worth – has started to take hold and
replace the longstanding but simplistic ‘last click’ and ‘last view’ models that were born out of
necessity.

What is the biggest opportunity in programmatic branding right now?

“Video.”

Daniel McGuire, Skinnyprice

“The biggest opportunity in programmatic branding is using the right data to find the most receptive audiences.”

Sree Nagarajan, Affinity Answers

“The same as what I see as the biggest opportunity in media overall. Speaking directly to an addressable market
of potential customers – people who are likely to want what you’re selling – and no one else. I’m not talking
about cookies either – whoever you’ve identified through cookies has already decided what they’re going to do.
You need something else to predict who you should target, not wait for them to shout out the need. The next step
is having that verification and validation layer built into the buy. If we can programmatically target and buy
quality media using predictive data with the press of a button, that’s a game changer.”

Christopher Skinner, MakeBuzz

“Premium inventory. We are seeing big name broadcasters and premium publishers not just dipping their toes
but diving right into the space. This in turn attracts brand advertisers. The increase in availability of rich formats
as well as video will also provide greater branding opportunities. Similarly the growth of private marketplaces
provides visibility and security for both the buy and sell side.”

Danny Hopwood, VivaKi

“A recent piece of research (commissioned by BrightRoll and conducted by Nielsen in the US) shows mobile is
now only second in importance to TV, and that brands need to be working closely with their media agencies to
ensure that their TV campaigns are supported fully by their mobile activity. Programmatic is key to this.”

Léon Siotis, BrightRoll

“An example of an interesting recent development in TV and video is the vision the UK’s Channel 4 set out to
have a programmatic VOD (video on demand) marketplace. In my view it is an inevitability… more broadcasters
will follow suit.”

Alex Tait, Kellogg’s

“The mindset shift towards more measureable branding and the realisation that programmatic allows for it,
turning these dollars from a CFO’s enemy into a CFO’s friend.”

Eric Picard, MediaMath

“The biggest opportunity in programmatic branding right now by far is leveraging audience targeting data to
create more bespoke, relevant messages that can be delivered for better ROO (return on objective). Marketers
and their agencies are doing an inadequate job of creating enough different, customised – if not personalised –
to match real-time programmatic media’s ability to match the right message to the right audience at the right
time and place at the right price.”

Bill Lederer

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 42

Eugene Becker leads the eXelate product team where he is responsible

for the development and commercialisation of the eXelate data
management platform and analytics suite. Bringing more than 15 years of
product and analytics experience, Eugene joined eXelate from WPP’s
Xaxis division, where he served as VP of Analytics. At Xaxis, Eugene
established the analytics and audience strategy practices for the world’s
largest agency audience buying platform. Prior to Xaxis, Eugene was the
SVP and Director of Analytics at MRM Worldwide, part of the McCann
Worldgroup, where he drove digital analytics and built products that
enabled channel planning, market mix modelling and cross-channel
dashboards. He received a BA and an MA in Economics from
Northwestern University.

Tom Chavez is an innovative and entrepreneurial technology leader with

15 years of experience in business development and technology. In 2010,
Mr. Chavez co-founded Krux with Vivek Vaidya, Krux’s Chief Technology
Officer, to bring meaning to consumer data and change the future of data-
driven marketing for major brands around the world. Under Mr. Chavez’s
leadership, Krux has become one of the most recognised and respected
data management platform providers on the market with offices in North
America, Europe, Asia and Australia and more than 100 enterprise clients
across four continents.
Krux supports more than two billion unique monthly users including over 400 million mobile
devices. Most recently, Krux closed a $35 million funding round led by Sapphire Ventures which
brought the company’s fundraising total to $50 million. Prior to founding Krux, Mr. Chavez
served as general manager for the Online Publisher Business group in Microsoft’s Advertising and
Publisher Solutions division. Previously, Mr. Chavez founded Rapt, an advertising yield
management solution, where he served as CEO until the company’s acquisition by Microsoft in
2008.
Early in his career, Mr. Chavez worked as a systems architect at Sun Microsystems where he was
responsible for optimisation and analysis of policy-managed networks, product pricing and
inventory procurement. He also worked as a researcher at the Rockwell Palo Alto Science Lab.
Mr. Chavez earned his Ph.D. in engineering-economic systems and operations research from
Stanford University where he was a NASA Doctoral Fellow. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in
computer science and philosophy from Harvard. For the past four years, Mr. Chavez has served as
a chairman of the board of Meritus, a San Francisco non-profit that helps low-income students
complete a four-year college degree and prepare for post-graduate success.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 43

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2015
Danny Hopwood is Head of Platform EMEA for VivaKi. Danny is
responsible for the evolution and ongoing product development of VivaKi’s
programmatic media buying solution Audience On Demand® (AOD).
Having started his career in 2008 at MEC Manchester with the press and
digital team, Danny moved to Starcom Mediavest London in 2011 to work
within the Performance team, where he worked across a number of clients
including More Than Insurance, Honda Cars, Capital One, Universal and
Europcar.
During his time at Starcom, Danny helped drive innovation across the clients he worked with
through the adoption of technology and programmatic trading. Danny joined VivaKi in 2012 as
Director of Product for Audience on Demand UK. Working closely with publishers, advertisers
and technology vendors, Danny helped AOD become the largest UK agency trading desk and was
promoted to his current role in 2013. Danny sits on the IAB’s Future Trends Working Group and
is a well-respected member of the ad exchange and programmatic ecosystem with a great insight
into the technology, data and inventory market places.

Bonnie Jackson is in charge of Digital Display, Partnerships &

Retargeting campaigns at B&Q. B&Q is part of Kingfisher plc. With over
1,060 stores in eight countries, sales of nearly £11 billion and over 78,000
employees, Kingfisher plc is Europe’s largest home improvement retail
group and the third largest in the world.

William A. (“Bill”) Lederer has led as Chairman and/or CEO digital

media and marketing innovation businesses at Getty Images, TNS,
Kantar/WPP and on behalf of the venture investment community since
1997. These include truly ground-breaking companies like: programmatic
trader MediaCrossing, Advanced TV/Video business units of Kantar and
Kantar Media, Socrates Media and Art.com among others. He is a global C-
level digital media and marketing services executive with extensive
founding/building/turnaround expertise in both entrepreneurial and
established companies in: programmatic trading, advanced TV/online and
mobile video, internet and ecommerce, advertising/marketing and
information services.
Bill is a former board member for public and private companies and non-profits, foreign and US.
He has extensive work experience in Americas, Europe, India and Israel. Previously, Bill worked
on Wall Street as an Analyst, Portfolio Manager and VP Research for two institutional investment
firms. He is the author of three published books on finance and is a frequent writer, and industry
and university speaker. Bill and the companies he has led have won dozens of awards for
innovation.
Tara Marsh is focused on connecting client teams to WPP’s digital
resources, both within WPP and with external partners across the digital
media/marketing industry. She also evaluates strategic partnership
opportunities, develops relationships with strategic partners and the
broader startup community, and facilitates the integration of digital
investments into the rest of WPP. Prior to this, Tara spent three years at
WPP agencies. She was a key member of the leadership team at Ogilvy PR
in London, specialising in crisis and stakeholder management. Prior to
Ogilvy, Tara spent a year at MEC, where she led the strategic development
of MEC’s approach to mobile marketing, including championing and
educating on mobile across the EMEA markets and providing mobile
expertise to client teams as needed.
Tara also worked at Landor as a lead brand strategist for multiple clients across both corporate
and consumer accounts. Prior to joining WPP, Tara spent five years as a consultant at Bain &

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 44

Daniel McGuire is the founder and CEO of Skinnyprice, a SaaS business

that increases e-tailers’ conversion by fundamentally rethinking how to
present prices to consumers. Skinnyprice has built pricing technology that
gamifies a customer’s shopping experience by making the price tag a slot
machine. A customer trades 15 seconds of their time watching a video
advertisement in exchange for variable discounts (5% to 75% off) on the
products they want. They can ‘skinnyprice’ as many times and on as many
products as they like, in essence deciding for themselves how much
time/effort they want to expend vs willingness to wait for the best price.
The system discovers a customer price sensitivity point (price
determination engine).

Sree Nagarajan is the Founder & CEO of Affinity Answers. Sree is a

software engineer by training. His previous experience includes product
management, professional services and field sales roles in various
enterprise software and services companies. Early in the evolution of social
networks, Sree was fascinated by how much emotional affinity data was
becoming publicly available. His passion for marketing analytics and the
emergence of this social data led him to found Affinity Answers (then called
Colligent) with a mission to aggregate this information and make it useful
for content and brand marketers.

Eric Picard is an advertising technology expert with more than 18 years of

experience in the industry. Eric is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships
at MediaMath where he leads several key initiatives, including the
company’s unique strategic partnership with Akamai, and also the
commercialisation of new product initiatives related to extension of the
TerminalOne Marketing OS into new media and buying methodologies.

Léon Siotis joined BrightRoll as the Director of Media and Publisher .

Services. He was recently promoted to Senior Director, Media & Publisher
Development and is responsible for broadening the company’s European
publisher base. Before joining BrightRoll, Léon managed all UK Demand
for the Rubicon Project, a leading technology and monetisation company.
As one of Rubicon’s first UK employees, he established and fostered
relationships with all the leading UK ad networks, DSPs and agency
trading desks. Prior to taking the plunge into the world of startups, Léon
managed UK performance sales for Fox Interactive Media and worked in
publisher development at Advertising.com. Léon holds a BA in Industrial Relations from the
University of McGill in Montreal Canada.

Christopher Skinner is Managing Partner of MakeBuzz. A frequent

speaker at Google conferences and other digital industry events,
Christopher Skinner believes that the existing digital media landscape is
actually limiting business growth. Christopher founded MakeBuzz in 2001
and has worked with over 250 leading companies, including Vodafone,
Target, United Airlines and Oreck. He holds three patents in marketing
automation. His latest MakeBuzz software is a reliable, simple and
affordable platform that helps companies seek out maximum profitability
by powering one-to-one marketing.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 45

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2015
Neil Sweeney has excelled in the technology, media and entertainment
industries for more than 15 years. As mobile advertising began to evolve
‘beyond the banner’, Sweeney saw demand for a firm focused exclusively on
the mobile and connected device space. In 2010, he founded the award-
winning mobile marketing and technology firm JUICE Mobile. Over his
distinguished career, Sweeney earned senior leadership positions in sales,
business development and strategy at top firms including: Stream the
World (Triton Digital), CanWest Media, Astral, Standard Broadcasting and
CTV. Sweeney also earned several academic and business awards, including
an International MBA from the University of Edinburgh, a Media
Innovation gold medal for integrating mobile technology into the 2006
Grammy Awards show, and being recognised as Canada’s Top Digital
Executive at the 2011 Digi Awards. Sweeney was also a finalist for the 2013
Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® Awards in the Media and
Entertainment category.

Alex Tait led digital across EMEA for Kellogg Company. Alex has held
digital leadership roles at Arcadia, American Express and the Post Office.
Alex has also previously chaired ISBA’s Digital, Data & Direct Action
Group.

Amihai Ulman is Founder and COO of Mass Exchange. Amihai focuses

on an innovation-driven product design and business incubation approach.
His career includes the areas of market research, financial services,
educational technology and real estate. Amihai also served as an Adjunct
Mathematics Professor at NYU/Polytechnic University. Amihai is the
driving force behind product innovation and intellectual property
development at Mass Exchange. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Political
Science with minors in Physics and Math, and also holds a Master’s Degree
in Political Science with a focus on Policy Analysis.

Tina Wild is Head of Account Strategy at Quantcast. She has more than 12
years of experience working in digital marketing. Prior to joining Quantcast,
she managed a department of ten digital specialists, responsible for
advertising budgets of more than £30m per annum, across a portfolio of
clients including Vodafone, Post Office, easyJet, Boots, HMV and
Eurotunnel and has also previously worked as a Sales Director at ValueClick
Europe.

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 46

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Anding Report

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Driving upper-funnel consumer

In association with Quantcast

In association with Quantcast

4. Introduction: The New Digital Brand Landscape ......... 14

5. Programmatic Everything: The Omnichannel Vision ... 26

6. The Impact of Mobile on Programmatic Branding ....... 32

9. The Role of Data Management in Programmatic

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 3

Other findings from the research include:

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 4

An important aspect of building a truly omnichannel approach is an attribution framework.

Figure 1: ‘Effective multi-touch attribution is the key to further programmatic

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 5

As mobile represents a large portion of the potential programmatic audience it is imperative

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

 Programmatic direct and workflow automation: One of the barriers to programmatic

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 6

Certainly, marketers must gain a competency in accessing quality video in programmatic

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

 Measurement: Core to applying budget to nascent programmatic branding efforts is the

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 7

1.1. Opinions about programmatic advertising

We can create engaging video content

There is a skills gap in the programmatic

Effective multi-touch attribution is the key to

Programmatic advertising is only good for

I have a good understanding of the benefits

By 2017 our programmatic direct spending

Programmatic advertising is ready for brand

We effectively integrate mobile into our

We can create smartphone ad experiences

Our programmatic direct spending outstrips

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Strongly agree Somewhat agree Neutral

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 8

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Other related Econsultancy content

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1.3. About the author

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 9

It is up to the industry to address every challenge from an execution and measurement

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 10

For more information please email [email protected]

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 11

3.1. About this report

 What is the current state of programmatic for branding?

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 12

Please see Section 10 of this report for biographies of contributors.

Figure 5: How survey respondents were spread across sectors

0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% 14% 16%

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 13

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 14

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 15

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 16

 Automated guaranteed / total automation: Demand-side technology, such as that

4.2. Is programmatic ready for brand scale?

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 17

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 18

Figure 6: Does your company run programmatic advertising campaigns

Programmatic Branding In association with Quantcast Page 19

Figure 7: What is preventing investment or further investment in programmatic

Data privacy concerns 23%

Difficulty proving return on investment 23%

Lack of good quality data 18%

Complexity of marketplace 17%

Lack of transparency 16%

Lack of know-how 14%