• by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, November 11, 2015

Booyah Advertising, a full-service Denver-based agency, is an interesting case study in how a trading desk was built for programmatic media.

I had a chance to hear about Booyah’s approach to programmatic today during Momentous 2015, a day-long webinar put on by RocketFuel, a programmatic marketing platform provider.

It was very interesting to hear Troy Lerner, president of Booyah, talk about the agency’s experience with self-service programmatic media platforms. Lerner’s experience is an object lesson for other agencies  trying to build their own trading desks.

For starters, when Booyah tried to build its own desk, it failed. Here are the five insights I gleaned from the Booyah experience.

Clarify what programmatic means:  For many people, programmatic still means buying remnant media. At other times, it means real-time bidding. And that’s true -- RTB is a part of programmatic. But misconceptions abound. If we’re going to be literal about things, programmatic means using machines to buy ads. To understand programmatic media, you have to understand why the machines are so important. For one thing, they’re fast and efficient.

Programmatic requires certain processes:  Programmatic is just a different way to buy ad inventory, and many people maintain it’s a more efficient and smarter way to buy it. At Booyah, Lerner discovered that planners treated the desk like an outside vendor. But think of it this way: Programmatic looks very much like the process of paid-search management.

Programmatic principles work best when you bring your own data:  Lerner notes that Facebook makes us assume that we can buy data about anything. But, he says, first-party data is “really what makes programmatic sing, in our opinion.” The most simple form of first-party data is consumer Web visits that are used to power retargeting. For example, you can target people who’ve purchased offline or in your stores.

Programmatic gives you a lot of power:  As Lerner put it: ‘When you have your hands on the controls in programmatic, you have a lot of power. Make-goods are really expensive.” For many media planners, make-goods are a backstop for a problem. The solution is that planners should check their work and make sure they’re doing things right.

Machines aren’t going to replace people any time soon: Lerner gets this question a lot, as do many executives who are involved in programmatic media. For the record, he doesn't see the human touch going away any time soon. After all, the power and targeting capabilities inherent in programmatic can be choked off if the banner ads suck -- machine cannot undo that. But the most exciting thing to Lerner and others like him is that media planners have never had quite so much control. “The media carries the message -- that’s what other human beings see, and what you have to get right,” says Lerner.

Other Notable Facts:

You don’t necessarily need any special skills to do programmatic media -- just curiosity about technology and the backend. “We want smart people who can ask lots of questions and understand the nuances between exchanges and programmatic toolsets,” Lerner says.

It’s somewhat of a myth that the adoption of programmatic media buying hasn’t been widespread. In fact, at Lerner’s agency, 60% to 65% of all media is bought programmatically.

But there’s still widespread confusion in the market about what programmatic is -- and too many people still think it’s cheap remnant inventory.

Resources needed to run programmatic campaigns: From Lerner’s experience, he says a moderate level of training is needed for people who already understand media. “We’ve taken media planners and trained them over 40 to 60 hours to be programmatic experts. Self-service tools help. It has been very important to us to have some people who truly love it.”

Do traditional methods ever trump programmatic? “Yes," says Lerner. While programmatic is an efficient way to buy media and decide what to buy, the tools are all built around scalable media. The challenge is if marketers want something bespoke or custom, they or the agency have to go to the publisher and make it happen: “There’s not yet a way for a machine to do that.”

 But wait -- do you think native programmatic might be next?