Programmatic ads can benefit brands and publishers in the long run: Arjun Mohan, UpGrad

The digital inventory in India is getting converted into programmatic inventory at a very rapid pace, Arjun Mohan, CEO, UpGrad, said while speaking at the e4m Programmatic Summit on Friday. Mohan addressed a keynote on the topic- ‘Making Programmatic ads work for edtech platforms’. During his address, Mohan highlighted the shift in digital inventory during pre and post-COVID times and emphasised that digital inventory had now exploded with technological advancements. He added that almost 40% of the digital inventory available in India is now programmatic.

Mohan shed some light on the future of advertising and said that programmatic advertising was changing the advertising landscape. “Programmatic advertising from a brand side or from a buyer side is fundamentally about purchasing through bidding and targeted placements on web and app assets in an automated manner. With Google improving its technology, brands can now access their inventory and change things very fast”, Mohan said. “We are expecting that this will only grow, from 40% to 45% in the coming year and on a global level also, the conversion to the programmatic way of doing things is growing at a high 26% CAGR”, he added.

Mohan highlighted how brands and publishers could benefit from programmatic advertising. “Programmatic is great for the publishers because they are able to get better CPM, when it's no longer homogeneous pricing. It is good for the brands, especially in running experiments. This is important for any brand in the consideration phase because when you target, you really don't know if this target can build consideration or not. With programmatic, these experiments the turn-around time becomes quick in one day till you can decide if its working or not”, he noted.

Talking about the growing internet penetration, Mohan said that in the US, the digital inventory is bigger than the TV inventory and in India too, we are closing that gap which means that there is a very, complex and large inventory available. “The best part about digital is this is indexed inventory. So, for a digital marketer, there are a lot of parameters to play with, which is not possible manually and that is where technology comes in. And that's what your programmatic is”, Mohan asserted.

Sharing insights about programmatic advertising in leveraging brand identity, Mohan shared his experience of using programmatic ads for UpGrad campaigns. Talking about rebranding UpGrad, Mohan said three years back, he thought of repositioning UpGrad as an upscaling edtech platform, which would suit the new generation and working professionals. Highlighting his brand-building journey, Mohan said that he started with repositioning the brand in the market and letting people know about what UpGrad was all about.

“The first step or first stage of brand building is awareness. The first thing we did for the first one and a half years was building awareness with the first few campaigns telling people that there is something called UpGrad in the market which is the right place where you should come if you're thinking about upskilling”, he said. “Upskilling was always a very small market because we indeed don't believe in investing in ourselves”, he added.

Talking about the technological advancements over the past few years, Mohan said, with the change in technology, people began realizing that even if you want to survive in your job, you need to keep investing and knowing about newer technologies and hence moved to the next phase which is the ‘consideration’ stage where programmatic advertising played a key role.