Digital advertising showed much more resilience than traditional advertising during the pandemic. By 2025, digital is forecast to grow to 67% of Asia-Pacific (APAC) ad revenue, with programmatic expected to be the main source of media buys in the next three to five years.
In an accelerating digital-first economy, it’s vital for growing businesses in the region to ensure that their marketing strategies keep pace with changing consumer behaviour and expectations.
Programmatic can bring immense value to a business, offering much more efficiency and accuracy to reach the right audiences in a region as diverse as APAC, particularly as we head into a cookieless reality that prioritises consumer consent and choice.
Although programmatic advertising is often perceived as complex, with numerous acronyms involved (DSPs, SSPs, and DMPs), the principle is pretty simple.
Essentially, programmatic uses AI and machine learning to make it easy to buy ad inventory on the open market, while ensuring accurate reach for an ideal audience. This is necessary given the changes we are seeing in digital advertising due to how consumers browse, consume content, and buy online. There is simply too much data out there now for a manual approach with advertising to be considered efficient or profitable.
Several brands are successfully using programmatic advertising to drive measurable business results. Here are a few examples:
Manettas Seafood, an online seafood retailer, used programmatic to access more high-value customers and reach audiences based on their current interests and demographics in real time. The campaign reached nearly five million high-value potential customers in Australia, and achieved a 600% revenue increase, with AUD $1.2 million generated through programmatic revenue according to the brand’s post-campaign analysis.
Singapore telecommunications giant Starhub acquired net-new customers across its different product lines by analysing the behaviours of the different audiences visiting and converting on its website. Starhub’s programmatic campaign results analysis saw a 21% increase net-new customers on average across all lines of business, with an 81% lower cost-per-acquisition (CPA).
Luxury skincare brand Lancôme used programmatic advertising to connect with new users interested in skincare. Post-campaign analysis by the brand showed a 6.2% uplift in brand and product awareness, and an 11.3% engagement rate with ad creative rich media executions.
So how can you drive programmatic success for your business? Here are five tips.
1. Set goals and measurements
Think about KPIs and metrics that make sense for what you’re trying to achieve with programmatic advertising. While clicks are the basis of search, they’re not ideal to assess display ad effectiveness in isolation. Display ads can be a very valuable way to drive exposure, awareness, and purchase decisions; however, programmatic success is measured more concretely with metrics such as increases in sales and leads per month, decreased customer acquisition cost (CPA), and increased customer lifetime value (CLV).
2. Deep dive into your audience
It’s critical to really know your audience and understand them, if you want to make meaningful connections and build brand loyalty. With third-party cookies going away, it’s crucial to ensure that you’re activating your programmatic ad campaign using real-time audience insights that can help you understand browsing interests, purchase behaviours, domain affinity, and devices.
3. Choose the right adtech platform
Leverage partnerships with adtech experts and ensure you ask the right questions. For example, does their solution enable you to see performance in real time, and can the media strategy be adjusted accordingly? What data sources are they using to build audience segments, and how does their solution define the audience segments you are trying to reach?
4. Experiment with creative formats
Programmatic offers a range of ad formats, from display and social to audio and video. eMarketer data predicts that digital video will reach 82.2% of internet users in Asia-Pacific by 2025. If you’re new to programmatic, a good approach is to test and learn with multiple formats, so you can understand what works best for your audience and optimise accordingly.
5. Future-proof with cookieless now
According to Quantcast data, over 50% of consumers are already browsing in cookieless environments, so if you’re not advertising to those audiences, you could be missing out on a significant opportunity.
Programmatic is a highly effective and powerful way to manage advertising in the digital age. By doing your research, asking the right questions, and maintaining an agile approach, you can create winning campaigns and enjoy a healthy return on your investment.
Learn more about what programmatic advertising can do for your brand or agency, and see how some of the world’s leading brands have enjoyed success through our award-winning platform.