• by Christopher Hansen , May 8, 2013

Media is going through remarkable transformations – it has never been more portable and flexible for consumers than now. We have the ability to stream content to multiple devices, engage with it when we want to and access it at any time. Appointment viewing and single media outlet consumption habits are a thing of the past. However, as the democratization of media gives consumers more choice and freedom, the result is more fragmentation as consumers take nearly absolute control of what, when and how they consume media. Brands must acknowledge this reality.

Although our media space has changed profoundly, the one thing that remains constant is that advertising is still about driving an emotional connection between the consumer and the goods and services they purchase. Successful brand marketers invest a lot of emotional and financial capital, as well as time, into developing and evangelizing a narrative for their brands. As consumers change their consumption habits, how do marketers extend their prized brand narrative within our evolved digital framework? With real-time bidding (RTB), brands can leverage the current environment as an opportunity to reach their consumers.

RTB as Key to the Opportunity

RTB is already one of the most efficient digital marketing tactics. RTB not only considers an individual’s value to a specific marketer in real-time, it also provides marketers with massive reach and scale without having them make tedious and time-consuming media buys with numerous publishers and networks. The real-time ability to hone in on the most effective time and place to engage with the "right" consumer means that we are evaluating the page content the ad is being served on, the audience we are serving to, as well as the relative value of both – in less time than it takes for you to blink your eye. Furthermore, we can reach consumers across a variety of content; content that is not necessarily endemic to the brand.

Of course, we’ve all heard the "right user, right message, right time" spiel countless times – but there has always been a key component missing. RTB adds "right value" into the equation to create true efficiency. For brand marketers, not only does this mean you are minimizing waste, you are stitching your fragmented audience back together, considering each user’s value as you do so, and connecting with them at the optimal price.

The Power of Context + Inclination

Previously, the focus of analyzing context surrounding an ad was to provide brand safety for the marketer. Now, we can use it as an important data layer that, when combined with audience data, can be extremely powerful for brands. The result is an understanding of each consumer’s true interest profile, what drives them to engage with a brand and a calculated prediction of their mindset in real-time.

As we work collaboratively with marketers to understand their brand narrative and the types of audiences they want to reach, we can optimize against all the engagement triggers we see. We might find certain times of the day, days of the week, inventory sources or content types that work better than others. As we apply this intelligence with a rich creative canvas (expandables, video, rich media units, etc.) to deliver the messaging, and a set of measurement tools that allow us to track the impact of our digital initiatives to offline behavior (in-store purchase data, tune-in and exposure data, car sales and registration data, etc.), we close the loop on a fully developed display system that works for brand marketing.

It is a myth that audience targeting doesn’t work for brand marketing. Instead, targeting through RTB has become a necessity for marketers to counter the nature of fragmentation and on-demand consumerism to access individual consumers at scale. Never has there been a more promising time to leverage the power of display to effectively market programmatically.