As the mobile device becomes the defacto screen for media consumption, it is critical for marketers to have a plan of action to reach and engage mobile audiences. On one side of the continuum is programmatic, where ad serving decisions are made so quickly and with so much complexity of data that these decisions can only be made through the automation. On the complete opposite end of the spectrum is content the consumer chooses to watch; native ads, content marketing and influencer content. Programmatic advertising is low touch and high volume. Native is low volume and high touch.
At the upcoming [a]list summit on mobile marketing, panelists will discuss how to integrate these two seemingly disparate parts of the advertising spectrum. As the mobile device becomes the defacto screen for media consumption, it is critical for marketers to have a plan of action to reach and engage mobile audiences.
According to eMarketer the U.S. programmatic market is $10 billion in 2014, and that’s expected to grow to $20 billion by 2016. Today 45 percent of programmatic media appears on mobile devices. By 2016 that will be 69 percent of all programmatic media.
It’s no surprise that programmatic media is the predominant way that digital display related advertising is bought these days. Significant infrastructure build-up for this type of buying, ease of use, accessibility by marketers and the ability to efficiently reorganize marketing activity has made the programmatic approach a key part of advertising’s future.
On the other side of things, an eMarketer study from earlier this year shows that native advertising on social channels is expected to reach $3.1 billion this year, and $5.1 billion by 2017. While there aren’t definitive statistics on the growth of influencer marketing specifically, it is clear by the abundance of businesses and individuals in the space that influencer marketing is a growing and very important part of the marketing mix. Recent purchases of Fullscreen to AT&T, Maker to Disney and investment into Machinima by Warner Bros shows enthusiasm for this space.
For marketers the opportunity is connect the automation and data of the programmatic approach and pair it with the native gatekeepers of audience on the web. These gatekeepers used to be publishers, app developers and ad networks. While these entities still exist they compete with influencers who distribute content across the social web.
The programmatic and native ecosystems overlap when we see through to the audience influencers reach, connect them to unique device IDs, model for lookalike behavior, identify larger pools of similar users and market to them.
In other use cases, ION remarkets to campaign specific audiences based on mobile and desktop tracking capabilities available by third parties. Finally, we use syndicated data tools to select a curated list of channels and serve influencer-created True View native ads across YouTube. By bidding on a small selection of highly targeted YouTube channels (often the same channels who have created videos for the campaign), we are able to expand reach and scale on-demand video campaigns.
