Three key takeaways from Nestlé, TUI and Mastercard at Get With The Programmatic

With senior marketers from the likes of Mastercard, Nestlé and Tui attending, here are the three key takeaways from Marketing Week and Econsultancy’s Get With Programmatic event.

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Moving beyond the ‘last click’

Marketers are increasingly targeting the wrong people through programmatic campaigns, according to Nestle UK’s digital lead Gawain Owen.

He told delegates: “It’s about having confidence in your strategy and targeting. In the UK only 20% of people own a dog so why would we target 80% of the population with a campaign for our Purina pet food brand?”

Revealing that Nestlé’s programmatic work has had a “positive impact” on store footfall, Owen said that brands “must brief agencies correctly for programmatic to work” as well as “avoiding the temptation to change campaign metrics half way through”.

Sammy Austin, head of media at travel brand TUI, believes marketers have to move beyond last click measurement tools in order to ensure quality campaigns.

“The biggest challenge right now is attribution as no advertisers are fully comfortable measuring ad spend outside of Last Click,” she explained. “We have to become more sophisticated and invest beyond Last Click to achieve true success.”

The ‘dark cloud’ of viewability

With the issue of ad blocking continuing to worry marketers, MasterCard’s global head of media Ben Jankowski admitted that viewability is a “dark cloud” over the industry.

However, he said that by programmatic moving to a more performance-based model it can combat ad blockers.

“Staying on top of ad blocking is one of our biggest challenges but the more we become performance based, the less I care about impressions and the more I care about people registering with us or engaging,” he explained.

“I care less about ad blocking and viewability if I can measure the true performance of engagement as it’s ultimately way more valuable.”

Nestle’s Owen, meanwhile, believes that brands impacted by ad blocking simply aren’t being creative enough.

“Creativtity is far from dead and ad blocking only affects bad creative,” was his bold assessment.

Using programmatic to deliver personalisation

Responding to critics who claim that programmatic can take the human element out of marketing, MasterCard’s Jankwoski insisted that the advertising platform actually boosts creativity.

“Programmatic is giving humans more time to do analysis if anything,” he explained. “In the near future people will start to not look at it as an entry into cheap media but a tool to deliver contextually relevant messages. Programmatic will become even more viable in delivering personalisation than today’s traditional ad tools.”

TUI’s Austin admitted that programmatic did bring an automated, generic feel to advertising at first. However, she insists things have changed.

She concluded: “When programmatic first came about the opportunity for creative wasn’t as strongly utilised but thanks to native we can now target the right consumer at the right time in the right context and at the right price.

“You have to use data, whether it is first, second or third party, to make content relevant for users in real-time so partnering with a creative optimisation partner is absolutely key.”

Marketing Week is running the next in its series of programmatic events in March. Focusing on bringing together creativity and programmatic it will feature speakers from brands including the Telegraph Media Group and Topman. To find out more about the event visit our dedicated event page here.

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