‘Programmatic is the future in order to generate a better ROI’

At the exchange4media Real Time Programmatic Summit, industry experts and brand custodians shared their thoughts on the future of digital advertising & digital transformation through data. The experts threw light on where the industry was leading.

The session was chaired by Shashidhar Sharma- Head Programmatic Practice, GroupM Nexus. The panelist included, Reethika Nair, Head e-commerce & Digital marketing, Dr Reddys; Varadharajan Ragunathan-Head - Monetization & customer engagement at Big Basket; Soumya Pattanayak, MarTech Head, BlinkX; Tishya Relia, Digital & DTC Lead, Kerastase India; Deepak Sharma, President & CDO, Kotak Mahindra Bank; Lalatendu Das - Chief Executive Officer, Performics India and Priya Bhatia, Business Development, OpenX.

The conversation discussed the challenges faced by the programmatic industry. Speaking on the same, Bhatia said, “We were waiting for the day programmatic will really evolve and that's the case with some of the mature markets like the US and that’s not happening with the APAC market, especially India. It needs to evolve and how it can be used in an efficient way. Where you are achieving your objectives as a marketer in the best possible way.”

On a similar note, Sharma said, “I think we are seeing a transition, especially, as organizations are massively investing in the CDP because one of the biggest challenges when you go for programmatic was about the consumers, their profile on the basis of which you can provide the content to them. I think the CDP part has been solved. But for the large business, it is still a challenge.”

Adding to that Das said, “I see there are three innovations that have taken place in programmatic. First is - the inventory has increased, like CTV, DOOH, etc. Second is - the contextual targeting, there are a lot of third-party data providers to identify the TG. Lastly, its the personalisation, it gives a great way. There are still attribution and fraudulent problems. But there are a lot of positive steps that have been taken.”

On the other hand, Nair, said, “Why are we thinking that Google and Meta are not programmatic?  Technically they do play on real time. The ecosystem is changing, Google is probably going to take audience data. There are programmatic challenges too and we need to give specific TG who you think is relevant. These are the transitions we are seeing from moving from media planning, getting sharper at finding the right TG.”

As for Pattanayak, “Google and Meta are moving in the direction of programmatic with the channels they are bringing in. If you see in the recent times, the way AI and tech have been used by but they have limited assets. Data is very important for all of us.”

While Raghunath said, “How do you speak to someone without poking them. The right level of contextuality from what I’ve seen so far is to talk to you at the level of a cohort which you’d like to be associated with, which broadly is not controversial and doesn’t indicate strong views about you. The problem is people think that data cut is the way you want to communicate. The data cut means nothing to the customer, he is interested in the psychographic characters of the cohort he belongs to.”

The panellists concluded that programmatic is the future in order to generate a better ROI and marketers should take note of that in order to level up their business.