Commentary
Rubicon's Novak Takes On Consumer Disrespect, Election As Programmatic Case Study
- by Tobi Elkin , Staff Writer @tobielkin, February 14, 2016
Wow. If this is slow, what’s fast going to look like?
“We’re at a tipping point right now,” Novak says.
The consumer has fully taken control, so to make marketing effective, the relationship between brands and consumers needs to change. It must change.
Novak says that right now, “our systems are quite disrespectful.” She cites retargeting and how consumers are bombarded over and over with the same ad for weeks on end, as just one example. Broadcast media has been getting away with this for years -- but digital?
My own recent experience with retargeting is a case in point. I ordered three dresses from Macy’s online. They were all too big (that’s a good thing), but the bottom line is that I returned them, while Macy’s kept retargeting me and continues to do so, weeks after the return! Macy's simply didn’t ask me what the reason for my return was. Had it asked I might have responded that I'd be willing to purchase the right size dresses at full price. If I don't need tailoring, I'm fine with paying full price on occasion.
I'm with Novak: Stop disrespecting me with the retargeted ads.
And that leads to programmatic, sort of. Novak tells me that the ability exists right now to build next-generation advertising ecosystems and marketplaces that will be more effective.
“We’re getting to a place where audience-to-audience (not impression- to-impression) audience matching from a buy to sell side is happening more and more,” Novak explains. “We can look at value. If the seller has the tools in place to be able to optimize their yield and the buyer has the first-party data, wherever it’s coming from, you now have the systems in place to do direct orders.”
Novak thinks we’ll see more programmatic direct buying this year. And I don’t doubt it.
Also, programmatic ads may be responsible for electing our next president, Novak says. “If you look at the dollars that will be spent between now and the election, TV is sold out. If you look at how close the race is--the ability to find certain audiences, to localize and targeti candidates’ messages--this kind of buying becomes more imperative,” Novak maintains.
Simply put: Candidates now have the ability to target and localize their messages as never before. Plus, there’s inventory available.
Novak says the election almost becomes a case study in how to do programmatic. Let's keep a close eye on that. Any campaigns willing to come forward to show us?
Happy President's Day.
Tobi Elkin is the Editor of MediaPost's Real-Time Daily and the RTBlog. You can reach Tobi at telkin@mediapost.com.
Tobi Elkin's Macy's experience may be due to a lack of integration between the customer service aspect - the merchandise return - and the e-com system which would have been set to target more promotions based on purchase history, without human intervention. The process logic behind the return reason, especially if it involved filling out a paper form with the reason for return, is somewhat more complicated. It involves more steps to update the customer data, and most important, a person to enter the form data into the right system. All this is often considered cost, centered on an exception to normal processing. Has Macy Co. even analyzed the cost-benefit ratio of such a personalized feature set, never mind budgeting for specifying the somewhat complicated, time consuming systems integration that the functionality will entail? This is where IT meets marketing.