Guest Column: Brand Building – as we knew it – is dead

Nitin Chowdhary, Director, Digital Infusion, highlights how Programmatic advertising has become a must for brands when it comes to making the ad-buying system more efficient and cheaper, as well as building a home in the customer’s mind. 

Advertisers have always been focused on the changing techniques of branding in the market. There is a hidden ‘R’ in branding and the one who understands that can master the art of marketing. Not too long ago, the only way a brand or product could garner some visibility and boost sales was to rope in a celebrity to endorse it. Some products saw an unprecedented increase in sales, whereas many did not create the buzz they had hoped for. This kind of brand building without any expectation of ROI obviously needed a desperate overhaul. But then again, this was a time when TV viewing was the in-thing and advertisers were fighting tooth and nail to ensure their ads got placed during prime time. As the Internet became a rage, customer engagement needed an evolution to suit the mood. ROI has now become an integral part of the measurement and ad-campaign optimisation matrix. 

The evolution of Internet happened through time and gradually people started opting for digitalised marketing techniques. With technology, the only constant thing is change. When people started using the Internet more frequently to find information about new products, sales, and shopping, a revolution came, Google began selling advertising based on consumer queries. Soon Google’sAdWords program allowed companies to appear to consumers at exactly the times when consumers were looking for them. Advertisers no longer had to waste money hoping customers would be interested. That’s how the importance of Programmatic advertising was realised. 

Programmatic advertising has taken digital marketing by storm; the Internet is a must for everyone and is present everywhere. The massive usage has made the Internet a necessity and for advertisers, a place to buy and sell. We no longer listen to what others say about themselves. Instead, we go online to learn what people say about them. Programmatic advertising knows the user and since ads show up on relevant pages to appeal to the user, the chances of making a sale are more likely than using random fixed ads on pages that are irrelevant to the people visiting those pages. 

Paying for highly effective ads, delivered to the right people, in the right context and at the right time – it’s a change from traditional ad buying, which is less targeted and based on sheer volume to Programmatic advertising, which helps the advertiser to make a focused sale and increase the ROI. As it is clearly mapped to the internal dialogue of your customer, this methodology results in a more efficiently directed campaign that helps to identify and target audience. 

With Programmatic advertising technology promising to make the ad-buying system more efficient and cheaper, the programming spend has grown from 28 per cent in 2013 to over 80 per cent of the marketing spends in 2018. Advertising expenditure in India is forecast to increase by 13.0 per cent in 2017, and 12.2 per cent in 2018 to reach US$7.4 billion as per the ‘Ad Spend Forecasts, June 2017’. Some major brands have even built in-house teams to handle their Programmatic ad buying as they spend more of their marketing budgets that way. Programmatic media buying is a complete solution for advertisers to match marketers and customers, at a large scale, in real-time, with the ability to track and nurture customers and verify sales instantly. Soon, there will be no area of marketing that will be untouched by this technology. 

Understanding Programmatic is a tricky business, but the one who masters it can make an advertiser’s life pretty sorted. All webpages we visit have a sizeable amount of ad space. Every time we visit these pages, click on links in there, click on an ad or two, all this information(referred to as web behaviour) are gathered and sent back and forth to an ad exchange and then the ad is placed on that page. These ad spaces get auctioned off to the highest bidder and their ad is placed in the space. These changes are effected in milliseconds that make sure that the user experience is not hampered and there is no time lag during page loads. 

The key target for a brand is to build a home in the customer’s mind and the personalised ad display and marketing helps in this process. This is a welcome to the New Brand Building. Industry experts make sure to guide and advice advertisers to use the most efficient models of Programmatic advertising. We at Digital Infusion execute the advertiser’s programmatic display buy and Rocket Fuel’s Moment Scoring technology through Demand Side Platform technology. The core message is to provide insights and figure the target audience according to the brand's requirements. The traditional brand building has taken a backseat and advertisers are becoming technologically advanced. Soon the advertising and marketing space will be ruled by Programmatic. 

(Nitin Chowdhary is Director, Digital Infusion, a data and analytics marketing firm incorporated in 2014 with an objective to deliver best in class programmatic advertising services in India.)

For more stories on Digital Marketing visit here.