• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 24, 2015

Programmatic Insider Summit attendees kicked off Day Two by getting schooled on programmatic creative by someone who, well, markets a school: Emory University Associate Dean of Marketing and Communications Angela Lee-Bostick.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, she said, big universities don’t have big marketing budgets and therefore are embracing programmatic technology as a means of punching above their weight -- both in terms of audience targeting, but also in terms of targeting the universities messages to them.

The reason, she said, is that Emory isn’t really marketing one product -- it markets a suite of products, which are actually individual degree programs that appeal to different segments of its audience.

Programmatic has become even more of an imperative in recent years, she said, because of the significant presence of online universities such as University of Phoenix and Devry, which came out of nowhere and used digital marketing to compete effectively with traditional universities.

Lee-Bostick broke the programmatic approach into three different buckets: 1 - Maximizing real-time opportunities; 2 - Figuring out how to target audiences by how they engage by using programmatic versioning tools to copy test; and 3 - guiding users through a purchase funnel.

She started off with the virtues of copy testing, noting that brands with small budgets like Emory usually cut copy testing research first, but using programmatic creative platforms enables them to effectively do it on-the-fly with a real world -- and real-time -- messaging platform.

Lee-Bostick then gave a practical application that took the abstract concept of copy testing into some real world applications -- literally, based on what people told the university when they filled out an application.

Using the user’s application data, Lee-Bostick said the university historically did the obvious thing with the information -- “send tons of emails about things that seem to relate to what you say.”

The problem, she said, is that people burn out on email marketing, so Emory has adapted the approach to real-time ad messaging via the programmatic marketplace.

In other words, she said, to “provide content and retarget you with things you’ve already said you’re interested in.”

One such application might be to serve ads to applicants who said they were interested in specific degree programs when the university places on a new ranking that relates to the applicants area of intended study.

Another incredibly visceral example was how Emory leveraged its role as a healthcare facility in the recent Ebola crisis.

“We fed that out to every doctor and every healthcare provider to show the importance,” she said. “We are giving you a story that reminds you about the reasons you told us you were interested in us in the first place.”