“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Chris O’Hara, vice president of strategic accounts at Krux.
As I’ve previously discussed, there are several basic use cases of the modern data management platform (DMP) for marketers. They include getting “people data” from addressable devices into a single system, controlling how it’s matched with different execution platforms and managing the frequency of messaging across devices.
In a world of ultra-fragmented device identity and multiple addressable media channels, you should be able to tie them together and make sure consumers get the optimal amount of messages. Big marketers use these tactics to save tons of money by chopping off the “long tail” of impressions, such when marketers deliver more than 30 impressions per user each month, and reinvesting to find more deduplicated reach.
There is so much more to the successful application of a DMP, though. The most cutting-edge marketers are taking DMPs to the next level, after investing the time in building consumer identity graphs and getting their match rates with execution platforms as high as possible.
Supercharge The Bidding Strategy
After identifying the long tail of impression frequency and diverting that investment into reach, where users are served up to three impressions per month, the key is driving users down into the sweet spot of frequency. This is where users are more likely to download more coupons, for example, or complete more video views.
If that sweet spot is between four and 20 impressions, marketers can adjust their strategy in biddable environments to ensure they are willing to pay more to “win” users who have only been exposed to three impressions so far. DMPs can match users with fidelity and deliver in near real time these types of targeting sets to multiple execution platforms, including those for display, video and search.
Optimize Partner Investment Through Reach Analysis
It’s a great start to manage addressable media delivery on a global basis, but what happens after you have identified all of those wasted impressions?
Naturally, the money marketers are spending reaching consumers for the 100th time can be better spent looking for net new consumers. But how do you get them?
For a diaper manufacturer that wants to reach the estimated 6 million new mothers in market every year, it’s critically important to get to 100% reach against that audience. Many marketers start with a single, broad reach partner, such as Yahoo, and see how close they can get to total reach.
It’s fantastic to leverage big spending power to drive down prices and get massive customer service attention to spread a message to as many unique users as possible. But no single partner can get a marketer to 100%. That’s where the DMP comes in.
It’s not just about filling in the missing 25% of an audience that matters; the diaper manufacturer wants to hit those incremental moms across quality, well-lit sites. Determining where you can get a few more million deduplicated moms is the first step. The key is to then decide where to find them more effectively from an investment standpoint, which requires an overlap analysis.
Enhance Partner Selection Through Overlap Analysis
Say our diapers manufacturer found 4 million new moms on Yahoo at a reasonable CPM. The DMP can then look across all addressable media investments and run a “Where are my people?” type of analysis.
Maybe this advertiser has another 20 partners on the plan after getting the bulk of unique reach from a single partner. How many more unique moms were found on Meredith? Moreover, how about finding moms on classic news and entertainment sites, such as NBC or Turner properties, or even non-endemic sites? Maybe there is an incremental 500,000 first-party “diaper moms” on a particular site, but now the advertiser can decide, based on performance KPIs and price, how valuable those particular moms are.
If those moms on a popular news site can be had for $5 CPM, maybe they are a more valuable reach vehicle than those found on the obvious “Moms.com” site. Without the DMP, they’ll never know.
Plus, marketers are also starting to optimize the way they procure such audiences, by leapfrogging over the existing ad tech ecosystem and doing audience-based programmatic direct buying using their new DMP pipes.
Understand KPIs Drivers Through Journey Building
Marketers that have deduplicated their audience and built an effective reach strategy can now go to the next level and start finding how those diaper moms moved from their first touch point in the customer journey to an actual action, such as downloading a retail coupon or requesting a sample package. When an audience is unified through a DMP, it’s possible to see the channels through which people move across their “customer journey” from awareness to action.
As an example, more large CPG companies are putting more investment into online video and, in fact, one of the world’s largest marketers has embraced a “ban the banner” approach and values engagement more than any other KPI – a metric more easily understood with video. With that in mind, a journey analysis can show marketers if seeing a few search impressions helped drive more completed views on (expensive) video and drive more brand engagement.
Did consumers download more coupons after viewing two equity (branding) impressions or before seeing the “buy now” (direct-response) message? The ability to understand how messages work together sequentially is the ultimate guide to being able to inform media investment strategy.
These are just a few of the next-level media use cases that can be accomplished once DMP fundamentals are put in place. DMPs are starting to shine a light on the “people data” that will drive the next decade of smart media investment. I think we will look back on the last 15 years of addressable marketing and wonder how we ever made such decisions without a clear view of audience first.
DMPs are starting to shine a light on the effectiveness of marketing, and giving marketers lots of new knobs and levers to pull.
It’s a great time to be a data-driven marketer.
Follow Chris O’Hara (@chrisohara) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter
