The future of programmatic advertising – Building a brand scalable environment
The third edition of DATAMATIXX ASIA 2024 Summit and Awards, held on August 6, brought together industry leaders to explore the frontiers of data, AI, and marketing evolution. The event witnessed a fireside chat on ‘The Future of Programmatic Advertising’, which was chaired by Nabajit Nath, Head of Sales - India, Blis. The other speakers included:
- Kewal Lohia, Associate Vice President, IPG Mediabrands
- Vishal Sharma, DVP – Media Buying, LS Digital
Nabajit Nath commenced the discussions by asking the panellists what kept them motivated in dynamic and demanding agency life.
Vishal Sharma noted that digital industry is evolving every day, which means that one needs to learn more and keep evolving personally as well. “You have to search for that thing that you have inside you which connects with the digital ecosystem and you have to drive that particular thing,” he emphasised.
On the other hand, for Kewal Lohia it was doing something one did every week. “You work across multiple clients and every week there will be something that will come back to you in terms of a challenge, so how do you solve that? Probably looking at how you can deploy new things for the client, or if you have come across something new in the market or the industry, how do we implement that? It’s all about what do we do next, otherwise, it’s like you are doing something very mundane; there should be something new to do every week.”
Nabajit Nath noted, “As programmatic advertising continues to revolutionize, with brands reaching their audiences and the industry stands at a crossroads, currently what happening is that with the promise of AI and machine learning, efficiency and effectiveness are there, but then a lot of questions and challenges are about data privacy, ad fraud, transparency. Thus, how can the industry balance the benefit of these advanced technologies, with the need of accountability and trust in the programmatic advertising space?
Vishal Sharma pointed out, “The industry is evolving. Before Covid-19, what I feel is that people used to think there is programmatic and display, you can get reach out of it and you are done. Eventually, the videos came into place – short form video, the OTT, and suddenly the display was replaced by a video format. And then the video format is now evolving so much that you have interactive videos, you have partners like Blis, who can give you engagement along with the videos, you can deep dive, do targeting on a real-time basis with interest, etc. So, it is all about trust.”
“What I have seen is that there are a lot of clients working directly with Google. As an agency when we talk to the client, we take an experience of talking to multiple clients and understanding their pain point and then resonating with what this particular client is asking for. That helps us create a story or probably create a trust factor – it can be through creative innovation, through data privacy. Some clients are tilted more towards BAV, some clients are tilted more towards performance, so at the end of the day it is about what the client is defining. So, that has to be tailor-made and created with a deep understanding of what the client is looking for, rather than giving an option.”
Kewal Lohia added here, “It’s not just a client-agency relationship, we are an extended marketing team for the brand. With ever-evolving programmatic investments, it is all about where my ads are running. As an agency, we follow certain local and global levers that are implemented on our programmatic campaigns, which are related to placements, etc. Most of the clients when they do programmatic, it is either through their seats or client-agency seats. The brands have access to where the ads are running, that is where the trust is built that the ads are running in a very media-safe environment. When it comes to accountability, it is not just the agency being accountable, but the partners are also being equally accountable. What is means is that the ads are running in a brand scalable environment – be it through the levers that are available through the platform, or we implement third party media multipliers, we are very platform agnostic. We are good at implementing all of those and we proactively tell our clients to implement media quality verifiers, so that confidence is there because programmatic is going to evolve and grow.”
These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, please watch below:
Share
Facebook
YouTube
Tweet
Twitter
LinkedIn