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Why we care about adtech: The complete guide

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Why we care about adtech: The complete guide

The boom for marketing technology has not left behind advertising technology, or adtech, but the digital acceleration wrought by the COVID pandemic has sped things up more. In fact, between the third quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2021, there was a 125% increase in M&A activity for adtech platforms, including several high-profile deals in 2021 like Mediaocean’s acquisition of Flashtalking for $500 million and AdTheorent’s $1 billion SPAC deal to go public.

Advertisers are willing to invest in adtech for its ability to attract a target audience and generate strong insights. But, there is another reason marketers are taking a fresh look at these technologies.

The pending loss of third-party cookies means contextual advertising will become more important than in the past and adtech is essential to marketers who are looking for ways to access customers through contextual data.

Adtech also gives marketers incredible reach since it connects them to all media. These technologies are especially powerful as most media transforms to digital or digital-first.

This guide is meant to give marketers a comprehensive overview of not only what adtech is, but how it is evolving and shaping the future of marketing. We’ll cover:

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Estimated reading time: 14 minutes

What is adtech?

Advertising technology describes the software and the tools used by advertisers to deliver targeted digital ads to consumers. Adtech aims to create data-driven marketing strategies tailored to match the target audience’s preferences. It streamlines the increasingly complex processes of buying and selling digital advertisements and enables brands to make the best use of their budget, maximizing their ROI.

Adtech includes various tools and technologies that help advertisers, agencies, and brands achieve greater efficiency, targeted reach, and real-time analysis and optimization. It can help marketers improve omnichannel engagement by targeting customers across many channels. What’s more, adtech may encompass programmatic technologies that use automation to enhance the media buying process.

Ultimately, adtech is a set of technologies and platforms brands and agencies can use to optimize their advertising operations. Successful campaigns use it to glean actionable data and send audiences the most relevant ads.

The components of adtech

Advertising technology is relatively straightforward, but there are a few key components that show why it’s a great asset for brands.

Programmatic ad-buying

Adtech uses programmatic ad buying to increase the efficiency and reach of digital advertising. At its core, programmatic ad buying is software-driven technology that seeks to automate all or parts of the ad buying process that were previously done manually. This has two benefits:

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  • Ad buying efficiency: Programmatic advertising improves the speed and scale of the ad buying process. This speed cannot be achieved manually. 
  • Ad targeting relevancy: Programmatic advertising allows advertisers to embed large amounts of data from multiple sources. This leads to users seeing more relevant ads based on their psychographic, demographic, and behavioral patterns. As users see more relevant ads, click-through rates improve, leading to a better ROI.

Programmatic ad-buying makes decisions regarding the placement and buying of ads using AI and real-time bidding (RTB) for online display, mobile, and video campaigns.

Programmatic ad-buying makes it easier to target your ideal audience since you’re essentially buying ad space that reaches a focused demographic instead of purchasing a prime time TV spot and hoping your target market is watching. Programmatic ad-buying also gives companies a unique and real-time insight into the reach of their advertisements. So, in turn, it ensures efficient spending and improves branding.

Finally, programmatic branding is often cheaper than traditional alternatives and is a good ground for experimentation. For example, you could use YouTube ads to test their effectiveness and use the results to help you decide which ads to air on TV.

Unfortunately, programmatic advertising is still susceptible to a fair share of fraud. Ad fraud typically refers to the following:

  • The presence of non-human traffic, which can range from simple to sophisticated bots to even entirely botnet servers.
  • Zero percent viewability caused by invisible ads, arbitrage, domain spoofing, site bundling, click farms, etc.
  • Intentionally misrepresented ads.

The open nature of programmatic advertising may, unfortunately, allow bad-faith actors to defile and actively cheat the system. Since anyone can offer or buy an ad, it runs the risk of fraud, which these bad-faith actors get away with since ad fraud laws are yet murky in many countries.

John Wanamaker quote on advertising

Demand and supply-side platforms

Adtech comprises two primary platforms: demand and supply-side. While demand-side platforms (DSPs) are used by digital advertising buyers to manage programmatic ad buying, supply-side platforms (SSPs) are used by publishers to sell digital ads in online auctions.

demand and supply side platform process in adtech

Demand-side platforms. DSPs automate the ad-buying process by deciding how much to bid on an ad impression in real-time. This decision is made the instant an ad impression is available on a publisher’s website or app, depending on the advertiser’s requirements. DSPs often use the outcomes of ad clicks, such as ROI and cost per acquisition, to ensure ad campaigns are optimized.

They reduce the need for constant back and forth communication between advertisers and publishers, increasing the efficiency of the ad buying process. DSPs analyze the best ad impressions as well as the price at which they should be bought through real-time bidding (RTB). This entire process takes just a few milliseconds.

If you are confused about the differences between DSPs and Google’s AdWords, here are a few key differentiators:

  • The extent of their reach: DSPs can reach over 15 billion impressions a day, a number that AdWords does not come close to. 
  • Targeting options: The targeting ability of DSPs is more advanced than AdWords due to real-time bidding.
  • Data freshness and granularity: Advertisers can check the performance of their campaigns better through DSPs.
  • Pricing: The pricing mechanism is different. AdWords functions on a CPC model.
  • Accessibility: While DSPs are difficult to use for most companies because of the high monthly minimums, AdWords is relatively easier because of the ease of use and the CPC (cost per click) model.

Some of the major players in the DSP market are XandrAudienceScienceMediaMath, and LiveRamp. Some companies also have agency trading desks (ATDs), which in essence act as in-house DSPs.

Supply-side platforms. Supply-side platforms (SSP), or yield-optimizing platforms, are mainly used by digital publishers to manage the sale of their advertising supply while maximizing prices. SSPs are similar to their demand-side counterparts, but instead, they are designed for publishers to sell ad impressions at the highest CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions).

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SSPs operate by opening up publishers’ inventories to bidding from advertisers on ad exchanges and ad networks. The core principle is to drive up prices of ad impressions by inviting a large number of bidders. This ultimately yields higher CPMs.

By automating the process of selling ads, SSPs increase the functional efficiency of the process in two ways. Firstly, they cut out the need for traditional back-and-forth negotiations between publishers and advertisers, making the process faster and cheaper. And secondly, they allow publishers to use a large amount of data that isn’t available in the manual buying process.

While many SSPs have amassed publishers whose inventories they manage and sell (effectively acting as an ad exchange), they are not the same as ad exchanges. For example, SSPs often connect to multiple ad exchanges, ad networks, and DSPs. They also grant publishers the ability to set price floors on some bids or make some inventory exclusive to specific buyers.

How is adtech changing the marketing landscape?

Some argue that advertising, and adtech by extension, refer to purchasing media for exposure to potential customers. On the other hand, marketing implies the communication of products and services with identifiable prospects and consumers. In other words, adtech is for media buys, and martech is for customer personalization.

But consumers don’t distinguish between adtech and martech. Most users interact with brands across multiple touchpoints and prefer to receive a seamless, coherent brand message across all platforms. It, therefore, makes sense for advertising and marketing teams to join forces. For example, businesses could use CRM data to promote brand awareness campaigns or personalize websites using adtech data management platforms or DMPs.

The unique insight into customer data provided by martech stacks can be used in adtech through email address, physical address, IP address, or UDID to reach customers at the right time. The issue is that this data is often separated from the adtech stack due to department silos — a remnant of non-digital media. But, with increasing privacy concerns, marketers will have to develop more people-centric solutions to get buy-in.

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People-centric marketing

People-centric marketing combines adtech and marketing technology and can reach potential customers by integrating their individual preferences and past behavior into advertisements. This strategy seeks to optimize sales and increases the chances of eliciting a positive response from customers.

This data-driven approach aims to foster brand loyalty among existing customers while also appealing to new ones. However, this is possible only if the marketing strategy adopted by the brand focuses on utilizing data to reach their customers rather than opting for more traditional approaches.

Improving addressability and eliminating silos

Addressable advertising refers to the advertising that links individual consumers with brands across multiple online channels, social media, OTT, etc. This is a direct outcome of the personalization of ad content – since consumers are used to ads being specifically targeted at them, anything that falls short of this metric will be rendered ineffective.

Advertisers could provide their ad agencies or in-house DSPs with more accurate measures of their inventory and programs. In combination with programmatic ad-buying, the outcome would be genuinely addressable impressions that could eventually generate revenue and sales.

Adtech can create people-centric marketing platforms by utilizing individual and household data about demographics, purchase history, digital engagement, and other attributes like consumption of media. This can link the brand’s existing customer data, third-party data, and ad platform user data to create a people-centric strategy for advertising. The retargeting and engagement potential of such a combination can transform campaigns.

The challenges of adtech

Despite being the next big thing in marketing and having shown incredible ROI, one of the main reasons brands have chosen to stay distant from adtech in the past is monopolization. Google and Facebook retain their positions as the dominant forces in the adtech sector.

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Both Google and Facebook have taken a massive lead in adtech by amassing vast amounts of data. And while the cost of advertising on Facebook fell during the pandemic, it has begun rapidly rising again. Facebook also faced criticism due to allegedly misrepresenting data to make their ad spots seem more lucrative to brands.

But no company can match Google in their acquisition of user data. It controls a large number of ad platforms and marketplaces for ad transactions, including YouTube. And Meta isn’t far behind.

Why we care about adtech The complete guide

The result is that many advertisers are compelled to make deals with Google and other large advertisers due to the lack of viable alternatives.

The death of the third-party cookie

For many decades now, marketers have relied on third-party cookies to track and store consumer data online. In 2019, Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Firefox’s Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) started blocking third-party cookies by default. In the same year, Google Chrome offered users the ability to block cookies on websites they visit. While Google’s initial plan was to deprecate cookies by 2022, they have recently updated their plans to phase out cookies by 2023.

Google is the leading collector of user data. Users’ information is tracked any time they watch a video, browse through posts online, or even casually surf the web. Given Google’s dominance in the advertising market and control of over 63% of the browser market, their optional version of the ITP will surely spell death for third-party cookies.

Since this transition could put them under fire from antitrust laws, Google has been cautious in marketing their version of the ITP as a privacy benefit to users. Engineering VP Prabhakar Raghavan explained this shift in a blog post: “Our experience shows that people prefer ads that are personalized to their needs and interests—but only if those ads offer transparency, choice, and control.”

So, what happens in the absence of third-party cookies?

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Contextual ad targeting

GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations spell the end of behavioral audience targeting, leaving many marketers searching for alternatives. Enter contextual ad targeting, an advertising method that uses the digital content audiences experience to serve up relevant ads.

Contextual advertising isn’t a new concept, but new machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities have opened up new opportunities. GumGum, a contextual advertising company, and SPARK Neuro, a neuroanalytics company, performed a study on just how effective this process can be. Using biometric sensors to monitor participants’ brain activity while viewing articles with ads related to the content, the study found that these ads generated 43% more neural engagement and 2.2 times better ad recall.

It should be noted that contextual advertising isn’t just about providing relevant ad content – marketers should consider which types of ads will perform best based on device, time, location, and other factors. Identity resolution technology can help ensure the insights gained from audiences are accurate and actionable, allowing for greater ad contextualization and personalization.


Why we care about adtech The complete guide

Identity resolution is not only critical to marketing success but is essential for compliance with consumer privacy laws such as CCPA and GDPR. Explore the platforms essential to identity resolution in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!


First-party cookies

First-party cookies have been essential to the web-browsing experience for a while now. They are codes generated and stored on a brand’s website whenever a user visits the site. First-party cookies are often essential to a user’s web browsing experience.

First-party cookies are used to remember passwords, basic information, and preferences. They are paramount to most e-commerce websites; for example, when users save an item in their cart on Amazon, they expect to see the same cart upon logging back in. However, in the absence of first-party cookies, the cart would be refreshed and empty every time they visit Amazon.

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The deprecation of the cookie refers solely to the third-party cookies, leaving first-part cookies as a means of collecting user information relatively untouched. This allows marketers to continue accessing and storing user information and use it in their ads.

Consent management platforms

Consent management platforms (CMPs) will still be relevant in the marketing sphere, with a greater emphasis on user consent and privacy. It has been seen that customers who restrict the information they share with brands show better ROI for advertisers.

The demise of cookies does not mean a lack of user data collection. As Zack Meszaros, marketing privacy engineer at OneTrust PreferenceChoice, says: “It’s [the death of cookies] not equal to the death of us collecting information … some of that first- and zero-party data we get could still be shared with third parties.”

CMPs allow marketers to build proprietary data sets from information that consumers have consented to part with. Clearly, data collection will continue even if it isn’t in the third-party format.

What is the future of adtech?

The consolidation of marketing technology with adtech holds immense potential. Advertising is an extremely dynamic industry, and constantly adapting to the times is the only way for marketers to survive and thrive.

Personalized ads make all the difference and are an integral part of the customer journey. But, to ensure this messaging resonates with audiences, brands must rely on technologies that deliver actionable first-party customer data and insights. We believe adtech tools and platforms will continue to adopt greater privacy compliance and data consolidation functionalities to help brands connect with their target markets. In fact, we already see the big tech brands moving in this direction.

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The data-driven, customer-centric approach of adtech is the future of advertising. It leads to more relevant ads for the users and better ROI for advertisers — a big win-win scenario for all!

Ways to learn more about adtech

The adtech landscape is in a state of constant flux. The increasing privacy concerns, coupled with advancing digital technologies, means marketers need to be aware of the assets available to keep their campaigns going strong.

Here are some helpful adtech resources to help you choose the best solution for your organization:

If you have any other questions regarding adtech and the digital advertising landscape as a whole, we encourage you to explore our resource library.


About The Author

1647397546 471 Why we care about adtech The complete guide
Akshat Biyani is a Contributing Editor to MarTech, a former analyst who has a strong interest in writing about technology and its effect on marketing.


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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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