Making Money On-line: Make Your Advertising More Accountable with a Data Management Platform

Thursday, 21 April 2016

Make Your Advertising More Accountable with a Data Management Platform

It’s easy to accomplish marketing tasks like sending an email, running an ad, or posting something to a social media channel, but is that action accountable to the business? Does it ultimately drive revenue?

A data management platform (DMP) and data-driven marketing are here to enable accountability. The more you know about your customers and prospects, the more precisely you can target and market. Sounds simple. And obvious. But add one more piece to this. With all the data available to marketers, if you approach this with an eye towards generating revenue, you can actually cut marketing costs by reducing waste and dramatically improving your ROI. Target prospects who are like your current customers. Target prospects that are more inclined to buy.

Executing a data-driven digital advertising campaign, with a clear understanding of your target, provides you with marketing that is accountable based on revenue. And this data-driven approach is better for your prospects and customers due to relevance. Relationships thrive when you’re communicating in context on a one-to-one basis. Marketing has the opportunity to reinvent itself as a core part of a company’s revenue engine.

The Growth of Programmatic Advertising Cannot Be Ignored

There is no doubt that paid advertising—especially digital ads—drives results. And the largest part of digital display ads is the data-driven, automated ads called programmatic. According to Ad Age, “Programmatic ad buying is growing not only because it makes ad transactions more efficient but because it can make them more effective, as long as the right data is applied.”

The growth of programmatic is incredible. According to eMarketer, programmatic digital display ad spending is projected to reach $26.78 billion by 2017. That’s up from only $10.32 billion in 2014. While that growth is important, what is truly notable is that it will be 72% of the total digital display ad spending. It was only 49% in 2014.

Programmatic ad buying has put data management platforms center stage. And in the next five years, as noted in the AdExchanger 2016 Industry Preview, the advertising industry “will complete a ten-year evolution toward planning and buying with technology.”

If a marketer is not using a DMP now, they will be soon. And even if marketers work with an agency for media buys, there is a move to separate the DMP from media buying or trade desks to give marketers more direct access to analytics. Marketers will become more involved in the targeting, planning, and optimizing of media.

Programmatic continues to evolve with private marketplaces. These are invitation only marketplaces where high caliber publishers offer their ad inventory directly to a select group of advertisers. If you don’t have a DMP, you probably can’t participate.

Learn how data ingestion, look-alike models, and identity can make your marketing and advertising accountable to your business. Download the Guide to Advertising Accountability today.