6 things to note before investing in advertising platforms

I discussed in my last post the need to have a technology platform in place for managing your digital media effectively. Once you decide to go ahead with that decision, the next step is to choose a technology platform from among the many that are currently being offered. The problem in doing this is that often these platforms makes similar claims about functionality and features and end up confusing the marketer more than educating him.

In order to avoid that, a marketer needs to be smart enough to see through the bull shit and to not get swayed by falsely claims.As an enterprise digital marketer, you must strictly adhere to the below points during evaluating an adtech platform so as to get the bang for the buck.

Multiple channels - Digital marketers work across multiple channels from Search, Social, Programmatic and direct Display, Video and Mobile Apps. A single platform should be present across multiple channels to suffice many of these needs. This helps in efficient management and removes the overall burden of correlating the massive amounts of data generated in individual platform silos.

Not a Point Product - Even if your need of the hour is to cater to just one channel, you should always be looking at platform which does more than just fulfilling your current needs. A new channel may gain prominence tomorrow or your digital strategy might change. Changing a platform, although now much easier because of the cloud based platforms, still requires considerable investments in terms of time and effort.

Analytics Integration - An adtech platform works best when it is tied to a good analytics platform and by good I mean a two way native integration. Data should flow seamlessly between your adtech and analytics platforms so that you can do a deep dive on your campaigns performance in analytics and build specific metrics within analytics, in line with your business goals, for optimizing campaigns in your adtech platform. Look out for platform providers who claim to have integration but in reality involves a lot of manual effort in data transfer. Safest bet is to look at adtech providers which also offer analytics platforms. A good example here would be Adobe which offers both Media Optimizer and Analytics.

Simulations - Gone are the days when marketers used to spend money on advertising campaigns and hope for the campaigns to perform well. An adtech platform should have predictive analytics built-in, in order to run the campaign simulations across channels before a marketer actually goes ahead with launching the campaign. This feature helps in saving a lot of marketing dollars which otherwise
would have gone into ineffective campaigns.

Attribution - It is not a secret anymore that correct attribution of your advertising money is the key to successful media planning and buying. An adtech platform should provide you with detailed attribution reports that can clearly tell the channels that work for you the best and the channels that assist your business objectives.

Local Support - Technology works towards success when it is provided as a service and not just as a product. Make sure that the product you are going to license comes with support from the provider. I cannot emphasize enough the need to have local support here and not from someone sitting thousands of kilometers away from you because you are going to need it a lot. You should clearly ask the platform provider who their support guys are and if they sit out of your country of operation. Any platform provider with support teams based in a different geography should be strict no.

Should you be investing in tools to manage your digital marketing monies?

This is a question which multiple marketers are trying to figure out for their organisations.
Marketers are confused since they are unsure of whether to invest in a tool, which invariably
includes investing in the hands-on training of the in-house people to use these tools, or to outsource the entire complexity of advertising management to a media agency.

It is no secret that if used properly, a tool increases the productivity and efficiency of the organisation thereby deriving higher rate of returns on marketing spends.

So the real issue is to decide whether to invest in media management tool and equip the internal teams with it or to outsource this entire business to a specialized digital media agency. Both the options comes with their own pros and cons.

The answer to this problem differs from business to business and depends on multiple factors like organisations strategy, capability of the internal teams, type and amount of media to be managed and also the relationship and trust of the business with their agency.

Lately many of the big enterprise marketers are investing in enabling their in-house teams with the advertising platforms to drive efficiency to media spending. Chief among many reasons to go down this road are to bring the branding/product/marketing teams to work in conjunction with the media
buying and spending towards common goals. Investing in technology in-house also allows businesses to circumvent the hefty commissions that agencies charge. Also investing in technology to solve problems brings in a culture which is self sustaining, forward looking and more future safe.The rapid growth of cloud powered technology solutions have made taking this option more appealing than it has ever been in the past. Marketers are free to experiment with these solutions without the risk of being stuck with one type of technology forever. This in-turn results in pushing the
marketing platform companies to out perform each other by building and offering more capabilities and services.

Agency business on the other hand is not dying anytime soon. Most of the big agencies have successfully transformed and have made themselves useful in the increasingly digital world. These agencies have the experience and know how of the real world media business and are steadily building the skill sets required in the digital age.Agencies themselves use multiple technology platforms and most of these agencies have people who are trained on using these tools. In many cases, businesses license these platforms and agencies use them thereby providing the best of both worlds.

Some marketers also attempt to hire a lot of workforce in order to outdo the benefits of a tool and to avoid the related cost. This is definitely not a wise decision given higher attrition rates, increasing demand of higher ROI from marketers, complex algorithms working across digital channels ,challenge to manage large teams
working on different digital pieces and to make sense of it all to drive unique marketing objectives.

I would like to conclude this piece by saying that investing in a technology platform is today's demand and a critical necessity for tomorrow. The way you choose to go about it - via agency or through internal teams, depends on your organization's strategy. Once you decide to invest in a platform, equally important is the decision to choose the right platform from the many currently being offered in the market. In my next post, I will list down the factors that a marketer must look at while evaluating any media management tech platform.

Rocket Fuel acquires [x+1]; signs of consolidation in display ad-tech

Rocket Fuel, a programmatic ad network focused on providing performance advertising to digital marketers, today announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire [x+1], an ad-tech firm with dual Demand side platform (DSP) and a data management platform (DMP) offering. The value of the total deal is $230 million.





Six months ago, Rocket Fuel had tried to bid for BlueKai but Oracle got there first.  Rocket Fuel was searching for a decent DMP technology for a while now. Since the other major DMP player, Demdex was acquired by Adobe in 2011, this had left only [x+1] and Aggregate Knowledge, other 2 possible leaders in the DMP space, to be considered.

Rocket Fuel has a complete managed services offerings(except in Japan, where a self service model exists) for its clients wherein it runs their performance advertising campaigns. This takes away the headache of campaign management for the clients and need to invest in people, tech and processes. [x+1], which has a fantastic DSP+DMP product, on the other hand is a tech-only vendor with self serving offerings to its clients. This allows for a much greater control and customized execution to the campaigns.

Customers of both these companies is set to benefit from the amalgamation since Rocket Fuel gets access to world class technology which can power its offerings and [x+1] customers can look forward to the experience of Rocket Fuel in deriving success from the programmatic display advertising .Still a lot of future success will depend on the integration of technologies and the go-to market strategy of the combined entity.

This acquisition ,and a few others in this space in the last one year, also signals  the growing need to provide a  complete set of solutions for marketer's needs - starting from tag management and ending at marketing attribution. End to end solution also allows for a higher share of the marketer's wallet and his/her confidence in you. Quite frankly, no marketer would want to work with multiple technology and service vendors and spend their days in only correlating the data and information.

The display programmatic ad-tech space is still somewhat murky with a lot of point products solving small parts of the marketing puzzle. Consolidation is imminent and necessary for the growth of the category and we will see some more players getting acquired in the days to come.