Commentary

Poll Indicates 'Engagement,' Not 'Performance' Driving Programmatic

Programmatic media-buying may have a reputation for being performance driven, but an informal survey of agency and marketer executives indicates that may not be their primary goal. To find out what’s really driving the programmatic marketplace, Netmining recently surveyed 131 agency and client execs and found “engagement metrics” was the No. 1 criteria, cited by 73% of the respondents. 
 
Performance metrics did rank high, including “online/offline purchase lift” (56%), and clickthrough rates (50%), but other core branding criteria including “attitudinal shifts/studies” were also significant (28%).
 
A melange of other metrics -- ranging from GRPs to ROI to CPA and “quality scoring -- rounded out the mix of reasons (11) for using programmatic buying.
 
Asked how marketers are utilizing programmatic buying, the top response was “prospecting tactics” (81%), followed by “remarketing tactics” (76%), ad networks (69%), DSPs/DMPs (61%), individual publishers (61%), video (50%), rich media creative (46%), and last, but not least, trading desks (36%), proving that programmatic is still a highly fragmented marketplace with lots of reasons and motivations for using it. But they all have one thing in common: A desire to leverage technology to buy media scientifically. 
 
2 comments about "Poll Indicates 'Engagement,' Not 'Performance' Driving Programmatic".
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  1. David Scacco from david scacco, April 26, 2013 at 12:36 a.m.

    I'm all for programmatic driving engagement, but this article is a classic case of a writer taking survey results in their own direction. The clearest take-away of this survey is that programmatic is primarily used for prospecting and retargeting.

  2. Joe Mandese from MediaPost Inc., April 26, 2013 at 7:05 a.m.

    @David: WTF?

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