The Experts Weigh in On Programmatic and Performance in the Year Ahead
It comes as no surprise, that more brands are turning to Performance Marketing, and to vendors who can provide the technology to facilitate Performance.
Performance Marketing is on the up and up, year after year. In a recent article on MarTech Today, columnist Jim Yu discussed Performance as an imperative for CMOs worldwide.
At the heart of his discussion, he urges that performance-led platforms should be at the core of the marketing stack. As Yu puts it, “The CMO’s performance imperative demands that they can clearly demonstrate how every element of their spend is bringing about meaningful returns, lest they fall prey to the very real risk of budget-slashing.”
Performance is the overarching concern for marketers everywhere, to justify maintenance and growth of their budgets.
So it comes as no surprise, that more brands are turning to Performance Marketing, and to vendors who can provide the technology to facilitate Performance but not sacrifice scale. But where will Performance lead marketers?
We sat down with ClearPier’s Ad Ops and Client Services team to get a better understanding of the future of Performance Marketing in the year to come. Here’s what ClearPier’s Demand Optimization Manager, Terry Kalambalikis, and Digital Analyst, Albert Ng, had to say about performance marketing.
1. What can we expect for Performance Marketing in the year ahead?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
I believe Programmatic buying will be the base of all digital performance marketing in the future. It’s the only way to move forward with accountable marketing.
The automation of programmatic buying will evolve and be extended towards optimization and contextual/behavioural learnings, in which as a result provide insight and recommendations to accelerate the process of taking the appropriate actions for a better performance
CTR will no longer be true measurement for performance. Instead, it would be primarily be measured through attribution.
Brands and Marketers will begin to realize that attributions requires them start applying processes to verify the data they are running on. Along with quality inventory, marketers will make the attributions part of a broader plan in order to create a solid foundation of data to run the most effective marketing campaigns.
2. What marketing trend or buzzword are you totally over?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
“Engagement.” Honestly, this is probably THE most overused word amongst marketers. It is not an actual measurement of performance, it is a fluff word used to generalize any results of performance. It’s also not specific enough and so doesn’t provide enough insight. Scroll depth, for example, is a strong measurement because it indicates how deeply engaged your visitors are with your content.
Engagement alone will include accidental clicks which can skew your results. Engagement over time, on the other hand, is a more specific metric that actually tells you something: your visitor’s propensity to return after their first visit. Engagement, isn’t enough, you need to expand the metric to get real insights.
Terry Kalambalikis, Demand Optimization Manager:
“Millennial” – What is a Millennial? How do you really define an entire generation with varying interests, hobbies and issues? What really makes them different than anyone else aside from the year they were born?
I mean, you get 29 year olds who may like Hockey, Politics, Movies, Videogames etc., but you also get 50 year olds who can and do like the exact same things just as you get 17 year olds who may be interested in the exact same things. They consume the same content as anyone else, and aren’t the only ones using smartphones or social media.
So how does one market to Millennials? I think this word is over used by pretty much everyone and is just a lazy way to define a group that doesn’t really exist.
3. What do you think the biggest challenge advertisers and brands will now face?
Albert Ng, Digital Analyst:
With so much content being created daily digitally, it becomes difficult to be able to authenticate or verify any third party sources that are being run by the advertisers. Brand safety is going to be the top concern, globally which means only vendors who can guarantee it – or at least has brand safety as a top priority – will win.
Terry Kalambalikis, Demand Optimization Manager:
Not necessarily a new challenge, but I would say Ad Fraud.
There’s no fool-proof way to combat fraud, and no third party actually provides a solution that prevents it. You can monitor it, and possibly action on it once you identify the problem, and use various wrappers that may look out for suspicious traffic and monitor for bots, but in the end, it won’t stop the fraud from happening, and would require media buyers and marketers to actively monitor reports and react on the fly, which is not only a massive, time consuming task, but a task that is likely almost impossible.
Those that enable fraud always find new ways to get ahead of marketers and exploit the system, just the same as how those who create malware and viruses are almost always ahead anti-virus programs, so the fight against ad fraud will be something that will continue to be a problem through 2017, and likely grow into a larger problem as more and more spend is pushed into the digital ad space.
Want to learn more? Connect with our team at sales@clearpier.com
ClearPier CEO on Data & Innovation in Canadian Digital Advertising
CEO Sunil Abraham Charts ClearPier’s Growth from Conception to
Founding and Beyond
As featured in Dx3 Canada’s Digest.
Toronto, ON – ClearPier has been making waves in the news recently after a string of new partnership announcements with big name publishers including, American Media Inc., Demand Media, and SheKnows Media.
Four years since its founding in 2012, ClearPier has become one of Canada’s leading premium marketplaces and boasts an impressive 2.3 billion exclusive monthly impressions. In the past two years, it’s doubled in size, incorporated Blyk Media into its core in-app and mobile sales division, and opened a new office in the heart of Toronto earlier this year.
As Q4 draws near we sat down with one of the driving forces behind ClearPier, CEO, Sunil Abraham, to talk about the company’s raison d’être and the impact ClearPier will have on the future of the Canadian advertising landscape.
How did ClearPier come to be?
ClearPier was founded by Jignesh Shah, our CTO, Steve Melles, who is also the Director of the Globe Alliance and Business Development at the Globe and Mail, and me in 2012. But like many great ideas, the concept behind ClearPier was originally just a casual thought born out of frustration.
After more than a decade of buying media in the performance marketing space, we were still struggling to overcome the issue of ad fraud. As billions of dollars were being poured into digital in the 2000s, rampant fraud also ballooned.
In addition to fraud, we also took issue with the lack of transparency that existed in digital with regards to pricing, performance, and placement. What was the point for advertisers who were overpaying for placements that delivered poor results? Meanwhile, publishers saw their margins shrink as more layers in the traditional ad stack were being added into the media buying process.
Something needed to be done. So ClearPier went from being just a concept into a company with a radical mission: to completely solve the problem of ad fraud that plagues digital media buyers, everywhere.
“In the digital space, it’s always data that decides the winning campaigns from the rest. Quality, accurate data determines who, where, what, when and how we target our audiences and to what degree of preciseness.”
Sunil Abraham / CEO and Co-founder
CLEARPIER
There seems to be a misconception that ClearPier is just a programmatic play. Can you clarify?
From standard offerings including rich media, interstitials, video and native, to performance and programmatic solutions, and finally branded custom executions – ClearPier does it all, with exclusive audiences.
The advantage with ClearPier is that our clients get higher performing campaign results with simple solutions. What many brand advertisers don’t know is that we do branded offerings with precision and at scale. Since we have strong one-to-one relationships with our publishers, we’re able to work with our publishers directly to create branded executions that are tailored to the right audience for our clients. The benefit in that is we can offer clients more demand, more control, more efficiency, and more insight without sacrificing creativity. We’re not just a trading desk, we are a comprehensive premium media buying solution.
How has ClearPier grown since its founding and what should we expect from you by the end of 2016?
We have some ambitious objectives. In our pre-market phase we purchased the assets of Admobix, a Canadian DSP, to help round out our technological solution. We also acquired Blyk Media, a mobile-first company, to help shape the foundations of our in-app and mobile sales. In Q3, our focus has been video and we’re working on expanding our DMP.
We’re a technology first company which means technological innovation is something we’re constantly undergoing. For us, technology is a means to a make our client’s lives easier and we’re constantly striving to deliver a holistic media buying solution. That means making integrations simple and efficient, while offering reliable and accurate data.
What makes ClearPier different from any other PMP?
In the digital space, it’s always data that decides the winning campaigns from the rest. Quality, accurate data determines who, where, what, when and how we target our audiences and to what degree of preciseness.
And so this is the big difference with ClearPier, we offer site-level first-party audience data. Combine that with a brand-safe premium environment, and the ability to achieve the best user experience with custom executions at scale and across screens and you have a winning formula for results.
Learn how ClearPier can help you get more from your ad dollars. Connect with us.