the programmatic primer

THE PROGRAMMATIC PRIMER © Copyright Warc 2014. All rights reserved.1 «

The Programmatic PrimerA MARKETER’S GUIDE TO THE ONLINE ADVERTISING ECOSYSTEM

by Ted McConnell

THE PROGRAMMATIC PRIMER © Copyright Warc 2014. All rights reserved.2 « VIEW THE FULL REPORT

About this reportThis is a sample of The Programmatic Primer, a comprehensive, in-depth guide to enable marketers to get the most from programmatic advertising.

Despite the rapid growth of programmatic

advertising, a March 2014 study found that

only 23% of marketers understand

programmatic buying and use it to execute

campaigns. Warc has launched this Primer to

help advertisers navigate the complex world

of online display advertising. Companies

who develop the right partnerships,

measurement, and data in the space can

achieve vastly improved marketing results.

The Programmatic Primer:

» deconstructs the ecosystem and goes

deeply into how players work together to

create capabilities for advertisers,

» features expert commentary from the

leading thinkers in the business,

» highlights a collection of use cases to show

best-practice programmatic in action.

Warc subscribers can view the full report on warc.com.

Not a subscriber? Take a free trial.

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About the authorCurrently a consultant, Ted McConnell works with most segments of the marketing communications industry. He serves on boards for web technology startups, works as EVP Digital for the Advertising Research Foundation, is retained by high tech media companies to drive product innovation, and helps large enterprises develop their digital mar-keting strategies and processes. His main focus areas today are ways to eliminate waste in digi-tal media, programmatic TV buying via the online display ecosystem, and ways and means for enter-prises to scale content marketing.

His passion for the web arises from the basic idea that everybody wins when marketers acknowl-edge by their actions the shift of power towards the consumer.

Mr. McConnell spent 15 years presiding over dig-ital marketing innovation at P&G, partnering with brands to put new marketing models to work for P&G. His innovation related work at P&G included building the world’s first private ad network, devel-oping test and scale plans for new marketing mod-els, and developing a global innovation strategy for the marketing organization.

Contact Ted McConnell on LinkedIn.


https://www.linkedin.com/pub/ted-mcconnell/0/5b5/8a2


SECTION 1

An overview of the online advertising ecosystem



The online display-advertising ecosystem is a networked community of hundreds of companies linked together through infrastructures of capital, technology, customers and suppliers. Just like eco-systems in nature, tiny emergent companies can change the game for large species. As in nature, complexity rules, failure is endemic, and innovation relentless. Advertisers who have been smart using the technology that’s available have harvested huge returns, but to the outsider the online advertis-ing ecosystem can be difficult to navigate.

The big differences between buying media in the online ecosystem versus traditional media buying, for example for television advertising, are centered on information. To get online ecosystem buying right, you have to know what you want to learn, how you will learn, and what you will do with that knowledge. Knowledge turns into insight, and then to action. Actions succeed or fail, and result in more learning. So, it’s a loop. You get smarter over time by enabling your learning to transcend campaigns. Once the tacit knowledge of market behavior is made explicit by data, computers can start to make marketing decisions.

The ecosystem, as it gets richer capability, presents new opportunities. There’s no cookbook because it all moves too fast. This publication is a primer designed to help the advertiser understand what’s possible, and frame “what’s needed”.

Agencies have been pretty good at tweaking the ecosystem to meet client requirements; yet, they are not always incentivized to explore the full palette of possibilities. This is no failing on the part of agen-

cies, but rather, of advertisers. Agents do what you tell them to do. But what do you tell them to do?

The best way for advertisers to be sure that all available tools are being used creatively is to have some basic level of understanding themselves. This writing is aimed at creating a beginning to that journey for advertisers.

TechnologyThe fact is that in marketing and media today, technology is everywhere. It’s in demand forecast tools for a brand, the planning data for that same brand, the research that looks at consumer needs and desires, the communication of requirements as email messages, the creation of inventory by browsers and publishers, all screens, the communication of creative to screens, point-of-sale systems when something is bought, and more. The online display ecosystem begins to connect these parts into a unified whole that runs at the speed of light, and we are just beginning. It won’t be long

Complexity, failure and innovation...

Just like ecosystems in

nature, tiny emergent

companies can change

the game for large

species

» Advertisers who have been smart using programmatic technology have harvested huge returns, but to the outsider the online advertising ecosystem can be confusing.

» To get online ecosystem buying right, you have to know what you want to learn, how you will learn, and what you will do with that knowledge.

» You get smarter over time by enabling your learning to transcend campaigns.

» The best way for advertisers to be sure that all available tools are being used creatively is to understand the processes involved

» Programmatic meets media buyers’ need to get the right message to the right person. Data makes matching of need to message possible.

Need to Know



FIGURE 1 THE ONLINE DISPLAY ADVERTISING

ECOSYSTEM

Credit: Based on “Display LUMAscape”

© LUMA Partners LLC 2013

Agencies

AgencyTradingDesks

DSPs Exchanges

Retargeting

CreativeOptimizationM

ark

eter

Pub

lishe

r

Con

sum

er

Ad Servers Verification /Privacy

MediaPlanning

andAttribution

Tag Mgmt

Measurementand Analytics

DMPs andData

Aggregators

DataSuppliers

Ad NetworksHorizontal

SocialTools

SSPs

PublisherTools

Ad Servers

Vertical /Custom

TargetedNetworks / AMPs

Performance

Mobile

Media Mgmt Systems and Operations

before television advertising is entirely controllable by the same mechanisms.

Different providers call it the ‘marketing operating system’, or the ‘marketing stack’, or the ‘marketing cloud’, but it amounts to the same thing: a capability to aggregate small increments of consumer knowledge into a database of prospects, and take marketing actions based on inferred or declared consumer needs, attitudes, and opportunities.

Creative people will tell you that it’s still about the message. True, but much of digital, especially direct response, is about the ‘offer’. Offers are test-able, in real time. Run a million of one ad and a million of the other to segments you control and see which offer generates more response or resonance. It takes an hour if you have real-time control of your copy, media, and measurements. This writing is about that “if”. How can you get that control?

Also regarding creative, different people are persuaded by different approaches. One-to-one ‘dynamic creative’ is made possible by the eco-system – so it’s possible to make a new message, per consumer if necessary, or tailor and test differ-ent segments. Measurement becomes marketing becomes measurement.

The technology used in the ecosystem is spec-tacular in its complexity and speed. This is how it works.

When an internet browser paints a web page (or a phone launches an app), it signals the ecosystem that it needs an ad to fill a blank spot on that page. The ecosystem creates bidding information, and advertisers bid for the right to talk to that browser as the screen paints.

The conventional window to fill the blank spot is a tenth of a second. The conventional bidding window is five milliseconds – the time it takes light to go from London to Glasgow and back. The ecosystem’s big limitation is indeed the speed of light: darn physics!

Not only is speed a challenge, but raw capacity.

People give Google credit for enormous computing power, but collectively, the online advertising eco-system is much bigger. Google handled 4 billion searches per day in 2012, but the display ecosys-tem traffics and decisions 50 billion ads a day.

Computer scientists from all over the world find their way to San Francisco or New York to work in the advertising business. The migration of talent from Wall Street to ‘Silicon Alley’ in New York is telling.

The democratization of what amounts to supercomputers is a key enabler. The Amazon cloud powers a surprising amount of this stuff. Amazon now has so many servers that it doesn’t bother to fix one when it breaks. The “cloud” just replaces it logically, and the users on the other end are not

The ecosystem’s big

limitation is indeed

the speed of light



“UserABC” clicks on a URL and the publisher’s content begins to load in browser.

Publisher asks its ad server if an ad is available. If no ad, server asks Ad Exchange.

Ad Exchange federates ad request to multiple demandside platforms (DSPs), the technology for buying media.

0.04 second

0.08 second

Ad Exchange sends each DSP UserABC's anonymous profile,website category, and page ad safety information.

Each DSP overlays advertiser targeting and budget rules, and applies third-party data.

Each DSP algorithm evaluates and computes optimal bid for advertiser.

Each DSP responds to Ad Exchange.

Ad Exchange runs a second-price auction and selects winning bid from DSP responses.

Ad Exchange sends price and ad from winning bid to publisher’s ad server.

Publisher’s ad server tells browser which ad to display.

Advertiser’s ad server sends winning ad to browser.

Browser displays web page including winning ad, and signals to winning DSP the ad was viewed.

BUYING ADVERTISINGIN REAL TIME

0.10 second

0.12 second

0.13 second

0.14 second

0.18 second

0.19 second

0.23 second

0.31 second

0.36 second

0.125 second

0

.36

SE CON D

SE CON D

even aware of the failure. The ‘big data’ back end is almost always involving a system called Hadoop, an open-source stepchild of Google that allows almost limitless data storage and fast operations via a concept that allows multiple computers to work on a single problem in parallel.

DataAll this technological capability would not improve anything unless it did what media buyers need, and it does. What media buyers need is to get the right message to the right person. That used to be unthinkable, except in the blunt terms of broadcast television advertising where you get the right message to the right person by showing the message to almost everybody – the right person is in there somewhere!

The ecosystem has to be fast. Almost any ecosystem provider can use technology able to search every profile of every consumer on the planet inside the 100 millisecond latency window. And it’s not just a few players that require this. According to comScore there are about 30 media companies with over 80% total Internet reach.

Data makes all this matching of need to message possible: data about who should see an ad, who did see an ad, who will see an ad, what context was involved when a person saw an ad, how many opportunities there will be to see an ad, and so on. Data tells us who is likely to resonate with an ad, who is a good target for an ad, and who actually responded to an ad. Data management platforms (DMPs) can model who responded and find consumers that have similar characteristics.

Data ends up being the key component of advertising online. Advertising is expensive for companies. It’s wasteful (and annoying) to give every advertisement to every person, so data is used

in an attempt to improve relevance. It works. Media mix models, not surprisingly, show vastly higher returns when advertising to the right audience.

IntegrationA word that comes up in most conversations in the ecosystem is “integration”. It is important to remember that this is just different computer programs having a conversation. The programs belong to ecosystem companies and are written in different languages, but they all talk. When you work with the product person at a demand-side platform company, for example, you are likely to hear about the supply sources scheduled for integration. Integration is key because it describes the activity required to make computers talk to each other.

FIGURE 2 BUYING ADVERTISING IN REAL TIME

Credit: © 2013 Turn Inc.

The ecosystem provides

much more than a way

to buy online display

advertising. It provides

the plumbing for end-

to-end buying and

selling and transacting

and measurement and

feedback loops and

learning



When standards are perfect and well tested, integration is simple. When you plug a printer into your home PC, the software drivers take care of the integration instantly and invisibly. However, when an ecosystem company integrates to another, the integration can be hours or many months of work by engineers.

Advertisers need to know that when a company says they are “integrated” with another company, it might mean a lot of things. How is the account-ing integrated? Does the integration create a speed problem for bidding? Is the integration fully automated, or just a bit of paperwork? If someone throws the word at you, find out what they mean. Reading this primer will help you frame the ques-tion.

ProgrammaticThe term ‘programmatic buying’ is being used, increasingly widely, in the context of ecosystem capabilities. The term is used to cover a wide range of ideas; it is sometimes used, very basically, to explain that, somehow, a computer is involved – and even to suggest that ‘goodness’ has occurred as a result. However, the buyer should be aware that programmatic buying, in this very basic sense, means little. Simply involving a computer would not produce too many benefits in isolation of marketplace effects on pricing, curation of data, and so on. It’s an old joke that computers can mess

things up faster than humans, and this rule applies perfectly in this case. If anything, reading this primer will help the advertiser figure out what someone means when they utter the word ‘programmatic’. Mainly it is used to refer to automated decisioning, but sometimes it’s used simply to communicate that data was somehow used to decide on an audience. Use of data has been essential to media planning for a century so it’s not as though data, by itself, is some stepwise improvement. What matters is what data, and how it’s used.

It’s true that in the ecosystem, it is possible for a computer to make programmatic decisions about which impression to buy, but the same program may be instructed to always buy an impression if it came from a certain source. In that case, a human made the decision and the computer just made sure that the advertiser was able to respond to the availability of that impression by supplying a cre-ative, and taking care of the accounting. Similarly, the computer may be reacting to data that infers something that is not true. For example, a lot of traf-fic on beauty sites is really men looking at pretty pictures, but an anonymous cookie derived from that behavior will inevitably be marked ‘female’ because the context infers female.

Indeed, the ecosystem provides much more than a way to buy online display advertising. It provides the plumbing for end-to-end buying and selling and transacting and measurement and feedback

loops and learning – all the phases of display advertising in a holistic, open system.

In the ecosystem, the inventory occurs when a computer paints a screen, and from that point until the impression is populated with a creative and paid for, all phases are automated. Television advertising is, for the moment, efficient to buy because one buying decision may acquire millions of impressions, whereas in the ecosystem it’s one at a time. Buying efficiency and media efficiency may be very different, however.

The beauty of impression-by-impression buying is that a transaction occurs on the basis of audi-ence inventory that actually exists, as opposed to the television model, in which inventory is bought on the basis that it will exist according to a statisti-cal projection.

When you hear the word “programmatic”, it’s a cue to seek deeper meaning. What program? Who wrote it? How is it informed? What is its role? What happens when it breaks? The fact is that the word “programmatic” has become meaningless (like “big data”). How many programs are there? Where are they? The easy way to get to the bottom of things is to specify to a supplier what you really want in terms that they can deliver. Don’t ask for ROI, they don’t control it. Do ask for ongoing proof that you will get a true exposure to your target audi-ence, with sufficient reach, at the right price.

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SECTION 2

Expert commentary



I t is inevitable that we will soon see a convergence between the disruptive, data and technology driven world of digital advertising

and the massive, staid, steady-as-she-goes world of TV advertising. The explosion of digital advertising over the past 15 years has shown advertisers what is possible: direct marketing within media environments; advertising targeted to people according to their behaviors, not just to content; media campaigns accountable at the impression level; automated buying, selling and negotiation; dynamic, real-time creative delivery. The list goes on.

The world of television advertising has resisted change for decades. It’s core models for packaging and measurement – gross rating points, day-parts, sex/age demographics and panel-based ratings – have not changed since the 1980s, largely because the media has never been so broken that it had to be fixed. Now, 20 years after the introduction of the Internet, that has changed.

Television audiences, which used to be concentrated on just several large broadcast networks, and mostly in primetime evening hours, have fragmented their viewing across hundreds of channels, tens of thousands of shows, dozens of different video capable devices and they watch throughout the day.

As data about viewing and purchasing become more available, and linkable at the person, household and spot level, the TV ad world will be turned upside-down. By 2020, $40-50 billion per year of US TV ad spend will be “re-priced and repackaged,” bought according to audience and behavior, not just content and environment. It will be transacted in automated, programmatic systems, measured at the impression and person level and accounted for on the actual “sales effects” created, whether it’s burger sales at McDonalds or movie tickets for Batman. The bulk of TV advertising may not be going to the web, but web ad technology is certainly coming to television.

DAVE MORGAN, SIMULMEDIA

Web ad technology will soonreshape TV advertising

Dave Morgan is the founder and CEO of Simulmedia. Previously, he founded and ran both TACODA and Real Media, early companies in online ad serving, targeting and sales.



I ’ve been involved in some furious debates in my career but none generated as much heat as the one that ignited after I gave a speech at

the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in 2008, when I warned publishers that advertising networks were commoditizing digital advertising. Don’t treat your assets like pork bellies, I declared.

Six years later and here we are, in an electronic trading exchange environment, where programmatic is not only quickly displacing ad networks but is an entrenched and growing method of transacting digital media.

Clearly, the mission for brands and publishers alike today is no longer to debate the merits of programmatic, but to build effective models for conducting business in an exchange environment. Those who master programmatic will have the competitive advantage.

It begins with a marketer’s mindset. Advertisers need to stop thinking of programmatic as a philosophy that demands a single approach. Programmatic is a mechanism, a method, and there are many different approaches. Craft your own approach.

On the seller side, sales departments have largely accepted the reality of a programmatic future. Media companies should be thinking about organizing teams around packaging the assets that can drive interest from advertisers and demonstrate the quality of their audiences.

Brands have largely let their media agencies transact programmatically on their behalf. The data strategy that supercharges programmatic buying is their focus, which is fueling their desire – a valid one, I submit – to build internal trading desks.

Technology has once again shifted the playing field. Publishers and advertisers alike need to respond and answer some tough questions. Can ad inventory really be traded like securities (or pork bellies)? Is it a good idea to build technology to facilitate both sides of the trade, as Google and Rubicon have done?

These and other questions need to be answered by each brand according to its own needs and realities. Programmatic isn’t a one-size-fits-all philosophy. Each participant needs to develop their own philosophy about automated buying.

WENDA HARRIS MILLARD, MEDIALINK LLC

Programmatic andpork bellies

Wenda Harris Millard is President & COO of MediaLink LLC, a leading strategic advisory and business development firm that provides critical counsel and direction to the media, marketing and entertainment industries.



By relying on computers to eliminate people costs in the buying and selling of digital advertising, programmatic offers buyers and

sellers substantial savings. However, when using programmatic on the exchanges it’s important for buyers to confirm what they’re getting for their money. Ostensibly, one is buying ad impressions delivered to a specific audience, but there are three areas where things can go wrong:

1. the frequency delivered is too high 2. demographics reached are incorrect, and 3. the ad is never in view to the consumer.

Here’s why these things can happen. Frequency gets over-delivered as a result of

cookie deletion, which causes an ad server to repeatedly deliver ads to the same computer because the cookies which specify that ads were already delivered were deleted.

Demographic targeting gets drawn astray by the fact that multiple people typically use a single com-puter and a cookie is unable to accurately identify who is using the computer at any point in time.

Last but not least, viewability gets hammered by two factors. The first is that users often don’t

scroll far enough down a page (i.e. below the fold) to where the ad is in view before they click off to another page. The second is when the recipient of the ad is not a person but a computer bot. Fraud, in other words. comScore has found that, on average, just 46% of display ad impressions are in-view and that the problem is far greater on the ad networks and exchanges, where viewability averages just 31% (and where fraud is higher).

So, while programmatic buying on exchanges provides cost savings, smart buyers have come to realize there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that they also need to confirm how their media plans are actually being delivered.

The good news is that campaign optimization tools provide that intelligence in near real-time, which then allows agencies to make adjustments while their campaigns are still running. Spending can be shifted as needed to publishers and place-ments where delivery is closer to what was origi-nally intended. Or buyers can insist on guaranteed audiences. The benefits then are reduced costs for sellers and buyers through programmatic and improved ROI for buyers because of more accurate media plan delivery.

GIAN FULGONI, COMSCORE INC

To Maximize ROI Think Beyond Programmatic

Gian Fulgoni is co-founder and executive chairman emeritus of comScore Inc.



SECTION 3

A guide to the ecosystem



The publisher controls, for each ad, the demand source that will be asked to fill an impression. In old school direct buys, an ad creative is delivered to a page directly from an advertiser’s ad server, without intervening decisioning in other parts of the ecosystem. The IO (insertion order) specifies which ad server and which creative, and the page fetches the ad and puts it in the right place when a browser executes the page.

This simple loading of an ad from an ad server without intermediary processing is fine for publishers until they want to harvest demand from thousands of available platforms. Then they need some help. The SSP provides that.

In the ecosystem, a consumer about to see an ad (publisher page) is an opportunity. It may be a valuable opportunity (like a person who seems to want to buy a car), or not. The job of the supply-side platform is to get full value (that is, yield) for that opportunity.

The problem an SSP has to solve is that the page has 100 milliseconds to find a creative to put into the slot, or the ad is wasted; therefore the SSP’s job is to get an ad quickly. It also has to solve a problem as old as commerce: it can’t sell the same ad twice but has to offer it to multiple parties simultaneously to get better yield and save milliseconds. (Exchanges do this too, but an SSP is built to connect to multiple exchanges.) The SSP figures out which one it likes and sends a ‘win signal’ to the winner of the bid.

The SSP estimates or is told the price it is likely to get, or be offered, from a given demand source. Demand sources are numerous: premium deals,

exchanges, ad networks, or DSPs. The bottom of the food chain is a house ad that produces no revenue for the publisher. The top is a premium guaranteed ad. The SSP may or may not ever get to touch an ad sold in a guaranteed deal. That depends on how the publisher uses the SSP.

The SSP, then, is a computer that is fighting for a publisher’s revenue. Most large publishers use an SSP. They are not particularly complicated in the grand scheme of ecosystem creatures. They optimize among distributors. Many SSP’s do more, mostly in the area of accounting and billing, but the basic posture of an SSP is to serve the publisher by maximizing yield.

Both publishers’ ad servers and exchanges overlap the function of SSPs somewhat in the sense that they can accommodate improved yield, or seek multiple demand sources in real time. To a demand source, like a DSP, exchanges are almost identical to SSP’s.

Any reasonably sized publisher can afford an SSP. Some would argue they can’t afford not to have an SSP. Exchanges argue that the SSP is not required any more, but publishers want someone in their camp representing them to the ecosystem. The SSP is without question there to serve the publisher.

Many large advertisers are also large publishers, particularly retailers. Walmart has a group in California dedicated to monetizing the eyeballs that arrive on walmart.com, for example. These groups might need SSP-like functions for the same reasons publishers do.

Supply-side platforms (SSPs)

» In the ecosystem, a consumer about to see an ad on a publisher page is an opportunity. It is the job of the supply-side platform to get full value (that is, yield) for that opportunity.

» The problem an SSP has to solve is that the page has 100 milliseconds to find a creative to put into the slot, or the ad is wasted; therefore the SSP’s job is to get an ad quickly.

» The SSP is a computer that is fighting for a publisher’s revenue. Unlike exchanges, which also provide other functions, the SSP is without question there to serve the publisher.

» SSP’s integrate with publishers, DSPs, networks, and exchanges.

Need to Know



More on the online ecosystem

» Publishers

» Ad Networks

» Ad Servers

» Exchanges

» Trading Desks

» Demand-side Platforms

» Supply-side Platforms

» Data Management Platforms,

Suppliers and Aggregators

» Measurement

» Retargeting

» Creative Optimization

» Sharing and Social Tools

» Tag Management

» Ad Verification and Privacy

Warc subscribers can view the full report here.


View the full report for a range of ecosystem guides, including:





SECTION 4

Use Cases



This case study from Kellogg shows how a clear framework for the creation and delivery of digital advertising, aligned with the right measurement approach, can drive both greater efficiency and effectiveness for brand advertisers.

BackgroundFor advertisers in the online advertising space, programmatic buying has been heralded as the ideal solution to current ecosystem challenges – with its ability to increase pricing efficiency while potentially enabling improved targeting accuracy and higher ROI.

Undoubtedly, two key components to the success of programmatic buying – along with countless other digital media buying strategies – are sound measurement and the speed at which actionable insights become available.

Today’s world of media buying and selling is fast-paced, with competitive advantages accruing to those who can make the correct decisions in real time. Measurement, therefore, must follow suit. Real-time data create the opportunity for greater efficiency and improved campaign outcomes. Marketers and their agency partners who are fleet of foot and able to quickly understand the extent to which their campaigns are delivering as planned – and who can then take corrective action as needed – are realizing improved financial ROI.

The following case study from Kellogg provides a paramount example of how a systematic framework for the creation and delivery of digital advertising, aligned with the right measurement approach, can drive both greater efficiency and effectiveness for brand advertisers.

Campaign goalsAs Kellogg continues to move a greater share of its advertising dollars to digital, its marketing and consumer insights teams have developed frameworks to help systematize their strategic approach to planning, executing and measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising across their brands.

Kellogg believes that the right strategy, right measurement and right optimization are critical to the success of digital advertising, as are close working relationships with ecosystem partners.

Kellogg: Using measurement to improve effectiveness and ROI

This is a perfect example of the right way for an advertiser to approach measurement. In this case, Kellogg pitted entire buying regimes against each other in a classic experiment. The best in class behavior from the advertiser was to have a clear objective, a genuine hypothesis, and the instrumentation embedded in advance of a campaign to measure the variables important to them.

Since this experiment, Kellogg has publicly claimed ten times improve-ment in ROI over nominal perfor-mance. Remember this is net of all the “waste” that the ecosystem can bring such as non-human traffic. In a world where CPG companies celebrate a six percent lift from a retail intervention, the Kellogg ecosystem initiative delivered 1000 percent lift. The main source of the ROI was likely improved frequency control and targeting.

Takeaways



These data provide a variety of key performance indicators at the individual publisher-, placement-, and creative-level:

» Percentage of impressions hitting target » Targeting index » Frequency of exposure » Viewability* » CPM/eCPM » Branding metrics

In-flight adjustments are then made based on a comparison of the actual key performance indicators to campaign goals.

Kellogg works closely with its buy-side and sell-side partners to identify opportunities for improvement and to adjust campaign delivery in-flight. Based on the comScore performance indicators, in-flight optimization is carried out at the publisher level, with publishers making adjustments on their sites to improve the accuracy of their delivery of the media plan and/ or Kellogg moving media dollars across publishers as

necessary to produce an improved overall delivery of the media plan.

Benchmarks in a computer dashboard are used to ensure a consistent and systematic approach to improving delivery of a media plan:

» Green signals on-target or optimal delivery at the specified media partner (i.e. publisher)

» Orange signals caution and potential need for improvement

» Red signals the need for further analysis and improvement.

Post-campaignFinally, to evaluate the actual branding impact of its campaigns, Kellogg uses comScore’s branding effectiveness solution (Brand Survey Lift™) or Offline Sales Lift™, a post-campaign solution that evaluates the in-store sales lift from digital advertising. With these tools, Kellogg is able to measure changes in key branding and equity metrics in addition to the in-store sales lift generated by its campaigns. Insights gleaned

Through a global relationship with comScore, Kellogg has been able to evaluate and improve the quality and efficacy of its digital media at every stage of the advertising process: pre-market, in-market and post-campaign.

Pre-marketJust as in traditional TV and print advertising, Kellogg believes that the quality of the creative plays a major role in the effectiveness of advertising. Kellogg digital creative must pass a certain quality threshold before being aired, helping to ensure the strategy is right from the start.

In-marketFor a growing portion of its digital media spending, Kellogg now relies on programmatic buying. For Kellogg, this provides a more efficient means of delivering targeted advertising. To maximize effectiveness, each digital campaign is monitored on a continuous basis, using comScore validated Campaign Essentials (vCE™), which feeds data to Kellogg and its agencies on a near real-time basis.

MEDIA PARTNER AVG FREQUENCYIMPRESSIONS IN

TARGETIMPRESSIONS IN VIEW LIFT IN AWARENESS CPM

1 3.5 24.5% 83% 5.74 $2.44

2 3.0 16.9% 91% 0.55 $9.08

3 8.4 23.5% 71% 0 $8.62

FIGURE 3: KELLOGG IN-FLIGHT ANALYSIS FOR BRAND X (Q3/Q4)



from these studies can not only inform in-flight campaign optimization but can also help improve future campaign planning and execution.

ResultsKellogg uses marketing mix models to assess the effectiveness of the various elements of its market-ing mix. Results from two brand market mix models show an increase in ROI of 5x and 6x for digital advertising since Kellogg began using comScore advertising effectiveness services to improve the delivery of its media plans. As Kellogg adds view-ability measurement to its optimization processes, it is expected that these ROI numbers will increase further.

For more information visit comScore

FIGURE 4: ROI RESULTS FOR THE FIRST TWO

BRAND MARKET MIX MODELS ANALYZED AFTER

THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE NEW APPROACH

* At the time of these studies, viewability measurement

was not yet available in the comScore tool. However,

vCE is now running on Kellogg campaigns and

viewability data are a critical component of the analysis

YEAR 1

ROI

YEAR 2

2X

H1 YEAR 3

5X

BRAND 1 ROI

YEAR 1

ROI

YEAR 2

3X

H1 YEAR 3

6XBRAND 2 ROI


http://www.comscore.com/Products/Advertising_Analytics/validated_Campaign_Essentials


An online movie retailer uses automated email series to recoup lost revenue. This case study demonstrates how programmatic techniques can be used to optimise return on email campaigns, as well as online display.

Background & Campaign Goals Movies Unlimited is the online store for movie

collectors, specializing in hard to find titles and

Movies Unlimited: Shoppingcart abandonment campaign

Publishers and retailers use retargeting technology to bring users back to their websites, often with user specific messaging.

In this campaign Listrak was engaged to target consumers who had left items in the shopping cart on a website without making a purchase.

As with other retargeting initiatives, there might be lower reach than other digital ecosystem campaigns, but retargeting can generate very high ROI.

Takeawayscarrying nearly every title currently available. With tens of thousands of movie titles and customers worldwide, Movies Unlimited has a tremendous volume of site traffic, but also saw a 75 percent shopping cart abandonment rate resulting in nearly 28,000 lost orders each month.

Programmatic EmailTo recoup lost revenue, Movies Unlimited worked with Listrak to implement an automated shopping cart abandonment solution that reached back to site visitors who started a shopping cart but did not complete the transaction.

The email campaign included a series of personalized messages that displayed images of the movies left in the cart and provided clear calls-to-action including “purchase now” and “save my movies.” The first email was sent 24 hours after a cart was abandoned with a message that communicated the recipient had left the site without completing the transaction and detailing, with images, the items left in the cart. If the customer completed the transaction then the conversation ended. If, however, no action was taken, five days later a second email was sent with a different subject line reminding the customer of the items left in the cart. If there is still no action, a final email reminder of the cart items was sent. Each email had a primary call to “purchase now”; with secondary calls to save or clear the cart.

The campaign also incorporated A/B split test-ing, where version A included a discount offer and version B did not. Both versions of the email had the same messaging and calls-to-action.

OutcomesThe Movies Unlimited shopping cart abandonment program proved amazingly successful, garnering 500 percent ROI.

The campaign generated 10 percent of Movies Unlimited email marketing revenue, while accounting for merely .2 percent of the email volume. The campaign had an average 43.4 percent read rate, a 25.2 percent click-through rate and a 20 percent conversion rate. While significantly increasing the number of transactions and revenue, the orders from the shopping cart abandonment program had a 27.7 percent higher average order value than other promotional campaigns.

The A/B split test also had interesting results: while the non-offer version had higher initial read and click-through rates, the offer version drove 26 percent more transactions and resulted in 36 percent more movies ordered than the non-offer emails.

Movies Unlimited and Listrak continued to optimize the campaign with a varied split test, as well as adjusting the timing of messages to increase campaign effectiveness, customer engagement and revenue.



More programmatic use cases

» Meliá Hotels International: Attracting

UK holiday bookers through display

and FBX

» Movies Unlimited: Shopping cart

abandonment campaign

» McDonald’s: Real-time marketing and

dynamic creative optimization

» Kellogg: Using measurement to improve

efficiency, effectiveness and ROI

» Telstra: Making telecommunications

marketing relevant

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View the full report for more examples of programmatic in practice, including:





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