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.