e4m Real Time Conference: Stakeholders weigh advantages of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising today comprises more than half of digital advertising dollars in India due to the multitude of advantages that it enjoys over direct media buying. Programmatic as an advertising channel has a lot of advantages like transparency, control, real-time measurement, and greater targeting capabilities. These and other key issues were discussed at length during the inaugural edition of the e4m Real time Conference on Friday.

The session titled ‘Decoding programmatic Advertising - An agency’s point of view’ had Trade Desk General Manager Tejinder Gill as Session Chair. The panellists for the session included Madison Digital & Madison Alpha CEO Vishal Chinchankar, Publicis Media SVP, Lead-Precision (Programmatic), India, Anil Pandit, Amnet COO Salil Shanker, and HT Media Group Head - Sales Excellence and Agency Partnership Mitesh Desai.

HT Media Group Head - Sales Excellence and Agency Partnership Mitesh Desai said programmatic advertising offers many benefits to both advertisers and publishers. “For advertisers, programmatic advertising offers a choice, simplicity of execution, transparency, and measurability. From a publisher’s perspective, programmatic advertising opens up the ad inventory in a safe way, especially for large publishers like us, and allows us to interact and reach out to more advertisers, which we otherwise would not have been able to connect with,” Desai said.

He also noted that programmatic advertising involves buying audiences and not individual websites. “We have 13 or 14 different properties and publishers like us can offer everything that we have in one go as long as we are able to offer the audiences that the advertiser is seeking.”

Meanwhile, Publicis Media SVP, Lead-Precision (Programmatic) India Anil Pandit asserted that programmatic advertising has a wide range of benefits. He listed two key benefits of programmatic advertising.

“The first key benefit of programmatic advertising is media consolidation. With new channels coming up, you can literally run an omnichannel campaign. Media consolidation has its own benefits like huge reach, reduction of wastage on impressions, and decline in cost per reach. The second key benefit of programmatic advertising is that it can be a data enabler and that is one thing that is making programmatic very potent. With programmatic, you can harness the first, second, and third-party data,” Pandit stated.

Asked about some of the myths that exist in the industry around programmatic advertising, Madison Digital & Madison Alpha CEO Vishal Chinchankar recounted that one of them was that programmatic is a cheap and leftover inventory.

The second popular myth around programmatic was that it has brought about the death of creativity. “You can plug in a DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimisation) and you can really offer the right messaging to the right audience at the right time,” he added.

Taking his argument further, Chinchankar noted that programmatic helps in bringing a lot of view-through attribution, also known as impression tracking. “Most of the marketers look at last-click attribution and say that the sales have come from these clicks but there is a lot of view through attribution which actually programmatic brings to the table which is ignored by the advertisers.” 

As for Amnet COO Salil Shanker, programmatic is the only channel where advertisers can evaluate each impression that is bought from multiple sources. Advertisers can also ensure that their ads are run in a brand-safe environment since they can be controlled from a single platform, he added.

“Programmatic is the only channel where you can actually plug. For example, if you have a search data analysis you can use the learning, plug into programmatic, and create an ROI model which works from top to bottom of the entire funnel,” Shanker averred.

The discussion moved to the imminent death of third-party cookies and how advertisers were preparing for a cookie-less world.

Madison’s Chinchankar said his agency was educating its clients to embrace the change that is coming due to the deprecation of cookies. He also said that first-party data will become very important in a cookie-less world. “Tech giants are sharp as they have tonnes of customer data to come over this cookie-less world. There is going to be a huge change in the metrics whether it is the CPAs or CPCs. We also have to be very clear about the metrics that we are chasing. A clear answer to a cookie-less world is first-party data.”

Publicis Media’s Pandit said that the cookie-less world held a lot of opportunities for the digital advertising ecosystem. “It’s a blessing in disguise. We have all known how good third-party cookies were so far but we worked around them for the last two decades. There will be challenges but challenges breed innovation. As we step into the cookie-less world the customer centricity that we see will go up. It will bring brands closer to the customers. It will also challenge marketers to balance privacy and personalisation. In attempting to do that, it will usher in an era of responsible marketing,” he expounded.

Pandit also spoke about the concept of zero-party data and how advertisers needed to focus on understanding their consumers rather than chasing their personal details like email IDs, mobile numbers, and device IDs.

Amnet’s Shanker said that consumer consent was the key. He wondered if cookies were really required because 80% of digital media in India is on mobile. “There are advertisers who used cookies for years but don’t know how to use them for their campaigns. There are lots of solutions like programmatic, contextual targeting and PI-based identity solutions. It’s about maturely using these solutions to precisely target and use it to future-proof ourselves.”

HT Media’s Desai said marketers would have to work very hard in a cookie-less world. “Marketers have to make more hard-working creatives and actually go back to basics. There is no substitute for great creative and great marketing thought. More and more players are going to build first-party data but the important thing is to build for the future.”