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The Digital Marketing Podcast
Exploring Programatic Advertising at scale with Adobe
00:17:32
Ciaran talks to Pete Kluge from Adobe about Programatic Advertising and the movements and growth within the industry. With industry experts predicting 20 Billion spend on programatic, the industry is growing at a phenomenal rate. Pete walks us through...
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Podcast brought to you by targetinternet.com.
- [00:14]
B
Hello and welcome back to the Digital Marketing Podcast. My name is Kieran Rogers and I'm joined by Pete Kluge. Pete, tell me more about yourself and what you do.
- [00:23]
C
Yeah, I'm a group manager for product marketing at Adobe for the Adobe Media Optimizer solution. That's our programmatic ad buying management optimization platform. And I'm focused primarily on the display channel.
- [00:38]
B
Fantastic. And tell us, how do you think, in your opinion, how is advertising adjusting to the current online trends that we're all seeing?
- [00:47]
C
I think very well. So there's a shift happening to programmatic ad buying. It's growing at a very fast pace. Industry research forecasts that $20 billion we spend globally on Programmatic this year, and that's expected to almost triple to $56 billion by 2019. So there's broad adoption happening of Programmatic at the same time. It's still in its early stages and not well understood by everybody. Not everybody has the same definition. They're still understanding what it is. But it's growing at a fast pace and people are learning about it.
- [01:27]
B
Let's just explore that because I'm sure there are people listening to the show who perhaps aren't familiar with what they'll know what display advertising is and ppc, what is programmatic advertising and how does it all sort of work? Just give us in a nutshell.
- [01:41]
C
Yeah. So at Adobe, we think about Programmatic in these broad terms. It's automated, transparent, data driven. It's the automated buying of ads across channels and devices. So in the past, many people thought about programmatic as display, excuse me, or real time bidding. But we see it more broadly than that. For example, we see search as original programmatic channel. So we see it as automated buying of ads across any channel, not just display. It's transparent. We that's important to us at Adobe that an advertiser has transparency into where the ads are running. They have financial transparency into the media costs, what their fees are. There's a lot of vendors in the industry today that are not transparent, that have hidden fees, you don't know where your ads are running, that kind of thing. So it's important to be transparent. And lastly, it's data driven. It's all about Programmatic is all about applying data to build audiences, to use that data for insights, to optimize the campaigns, to make those automated ad buying decisions. So that's how we think about it broadly.
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B
So with Programmatic, is it less about Volume and more about quality or is it a bit of both?
- [03:00]
C
It's about quality, but at scale. Yeah. So in the past it's more efficient. So you can do it at scale, which means you get higher quantity as well. In the past, for example, you'd have to. If you wanted to reach a large number of users before programmatic and real time bidding and DSPs, you'd go buy ad space on multiple publishers, you'd go to msn, Yahoo, aol, buy ads there. But it wasn't efficient because there was no way to de dupe the same user. You could go to all three of those sites and we'd be reaching you at least three times with three ads, but we have no way to know that. And buying through a dsp, you're buying at the impression level across all the ad exchanges, basically the entire web. So it's way more efficient and you can do things like frequency capping, for example. So it's quality and quantity at scale.
- [03:53]
B
And just to be precise, DSP stands.
- [03:55]
C
For demand side platform.
- [03:57]
B
Demand side platform. And what is that?
- [04:01]
C
The demand side platform is a technology that has the real time bidding capabilities. So to take a step back, we have ad exchanges today that the way I think about them are, is like a stock market where you have people buying and selling ads. I mean stock market is buying and selling stock. An ad exchange, you have publishers selling ad space and you have advertisers buying it. It's an auction environment, it's a real time auction. And the demand side platform is a technology used to plug in to the ad exchanges. It has these real time bidding capabilities, it has the campaign management capabilities, optimization capability. So that's what an advertiser would use. They'd work with the demand side platform to buy across the web in real time.
- [04:51]
B
Right. So it's a way of knitting together different advertising networks. So you're managing all through one platform. If I understood that right.
- [05:00]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the demand side platform, so we're actually Adobe Media Optimizer. The display channel is a demand side platform and we're integrated with all the top ad exchanges like the Google Ad Exchange, Facebook Exchange, Index Exchange, Rubicon adexus. And you're buying across all those at the impression level within the one platform.
- [05:20]
B
So what challenges do you think the modern marketer faces when trying to work out where they're marketing pounds or dollars should best be spent and how to get the best return on investment?
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C
Yeah, there's a understanding having the right insights to allocate your budget to most Efficiently meet performance goals is a challenge we hear about from advertisers. So for example, how much money do I spend on search advertising, how much do I spend on display, how much on social and Facebook, how do I allocate the budget? How are those channels working together? And so that's something that we hear about a lot and it's something that we talk about as a differentiator for our platform. We have all three channels, search, social and display within a programmatic ad buying platform.
- [06:12]
B
Which is unusual, right?
- [06:13]
C
It is unusual.
- [06:14]
B
I've not come across it before until I was demoed it recently. And I knew you did the display, I got excited that you also did social media. But then I was shown the whole, you know, pay per click side kind of, you know, search advertising as we all know it. And to see all three knitted together in one platform is very exciting.
- [06:35]
C
Yeah, there's a lot of point solutions out there that only have displayed by being a point solution. They don't have those cross channel insights. So having all the channels in the same platform, we use the same tracking pixel or method across all the channels. So we see that whole path to conversion and we can get accurate attribution insights that way. So we can see if a user saw a display ad, then they search and then they click the display ad and they went to Facebook and then they bought something. Well, we see that whole path to conversion, how the channels are working together, which channels are driving the most revenue, you know, things like that.
- [07:10]
B
So yeah, that's really interesting. So I mean, I guess in your role you, in a sense, I know every journey is unique and different, but do you get a sense of what the typical classic path to conversion is? Is there a certain way of us more simplistically looking at all these different places and mediums that we can advertise it to sort of work out? Well, you know, we should be perhaps spending some time on display first before we then move sort of following where the customer journey I suppose is. That's really what you want to reflect in a good campaign.
- [07:45]
C
You know, it varies by advertiser and industry, but that's the kind of insights you can get is we can see in this path to conversion who was the introducer, who was a closer, what was the last touch before the conversion. We have different attribution models on our platform that the platform optimizes against. So it could be optimized to last click, it could be optimizing to an even distribution across channels, different weightings across channels. But definitely we're seeing that all the channels do work together if you add display, if you have search and you add display, you definitely see a lift in convergence of performance by doing that. So they do work together. Display, oftentimes search gets the last click. Display doesn't always get the credit it should. And having it all on the same platform, you can see the display ads, for example, are influencing users go click and sometimes influencing directs conversion. So that's the kind of insights you get in having all the channels in the same platform.
- [08:45]
B
And I know certainly in the uk, quite a bit of research has been done into, you know, what attribution models businesses are using. And you know, still I think that in the UK the figures show something like 60% of businesses still rely on last click attribution. What kind of other attribution models do you think every marketer should be looking at? Because they all have their place. Right. There's no one size fits all when it comes to attribution.
- [09:09]
C
My view on it is that I come from a direct marketing background where you test everything and see what works best for your business and that's where you allocate your budget. And the nice thing about our platform is that we have five different attribution models that you can use in the platform that will optimize against. So you can try those, play around with those, see which ones are most efficiently driving convertings for you. Yeah, so I mean, you know, I.
- [09:35]
B
It's experimentation really.
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C
Yeah, yeah.
- [09:39]
B
So what, what trends in digital advertising should marketers really be focusing on, in your opinion? Right. Right now? What are the key, key factors they need to be considering when they're planning their campaigns and putting stuff together?
- [09:52]
C
So first off, so a big part of what we were talking about at some in the last couple sessions is, is about experiences. So we think about the same thing with advertising is delivering compelling, consistent, relevant experiences. And with the digital revolution, consumers expect compelling experiences. So that's a big area to focus. And advertisers have access to more data than ever before. We have offline customer data, we have online site visitor data, partner data, third party data. You know, all this data can be used to personalize ad content. So that's, that's a big focus area for most advertisers and what you should be thinking about, that's what, that's the way, that's what consumers expect and that's the best way to get them to engage with their ads is to have compelling personalized content. Other things to think about when we think about programmatic Advertising technologies, we try to boil it down to the basics that you need to run an efficient campaign. When you look at like Lunascape for example, you see there's like hundreds of tech vendors out there, it could be really overwhelming. So we just boil it down to basis. When you're planning a campaign, you think about your audience, who you're trying to reach, where you're going to reach those users, the media buying part of it, and what is the message you're going to deliver to those users and the creative piece of it. So for us, the technologies you need are data management platform to consolidate your your audiences down to individual user profiles for targeting, building your audiences that you want to reach, the media buying piece of programmatic ad buying platform and then dynamic creative optimization allows you to personalize that content for each user. So those are some of the things that we think about. Does that answer your question? Yeah, I've got your question.
- [11:35]
B
I should explain. Paul, Pete, you will hear a bit of background noise. We're actually sat in the Excel Center, Adobe's summit. And Pete, Pete, actually you've had like two hours sleep, which you've flown in, you've jet lagged and you're speaking very, very lucidly.
- [11:51]
C
It's brilliant.
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B
I'm in awe.
- [11:53]
C
Maybe I do better when I'm half asleep and not thinking that much about it.
- [11:57]
B
So in terms of what Adobe have within their suite, I'd really like to introduce people to the basics of it because I found it fascinating. It's been, you know, I've been on a real steep learning curve here at the summit on what you guys do have to offer. I think it's quite unique and quite exciting. What are the different components just to give people a flavor and how do they work and interact? There's a number of things you can do.
- [12:24]
C
Yeah. So at the high level, the Adobe marketing cloud level, we have eight solutions. Everything from a website analytics solution, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target allows advertisers to test content on their site, deliver relevant content to users that go to the website. We have our data management platforms. Audience Manager, Adobe Media Optimizer we've talked about is our programmatic ad buying platform.
- [12:54]
B
That's the one we were talking about just now. Isn't where you can actually advertise within PPC networks or on display, Cross search on display?
- [13:02]
C
Yes. We have a video content delivery platform with primetime TV content, Adobe Experience Manager for managing content across your website and across devices. And the exciting thing is that we're tying all these solutions together with what we call core services. And that's actually the really cool part. So one of those is based on audiences. So we have a consistent. You're able to. The core service integrates the solutions together in different ways. And one of those is being able to access the same audience across all the different solutions, which is pretty cool. So then you can really deliver a relevant experience. We can reach that same audience with a display ad and our programmatic ad buying platform as you can in Adobe Target, which is our site optimization platform. Actually, one of the solutions, I didn't even mention a big one, Adobe campaign, is our marketing automation email campaign solution. Same thing there. There's an integration there with our audiences where you can take audiences from an email campaign and use them with audience manager to build customers. So this connection between all the different solutions, which is really exciting when we think about our. So we have ad tech and marketing tech solutions as part of the cloud. When we think about our kind of just core ad stack, it's Audience Manager. DMP Media Optimizer is a programmatic ad buying platform. And a key piece of that is integration with Adobe analytics, being able to take that analytics data and use it to build audiences and to target ads.
- [14:42]
B
And it all sounds quite technical when you get into the different components, but actually the aim of it all is pretty simple, which is a consistent experience, you know, as granular as you want to make it for specific uses. And, you know, that's been the big thing everybody's been, you know, talking a lot about over the last two days. That for me, as a market is very exciting to suddenly find. You know, for years we've been working with these disparate solutions and disparate platforms that will do what they do very, very well. But there's not a lot of joined up between them. And so they repeat and they annoy and, you know, people get frustrated. Why, why doesn't your email know that I've just bought this? Why is it, you know, all of that and it's very exciting. Yeah, the direction that it's going.
- [15:27]
C
It really is. And it's, it's amazing what Adobe has done in the last like seven or eight years. You know, they. Adobe bought Omniture, which became Adobe Analytics. Efficient Frontier is our programmatic ad buying platform. We bought Dendex, the dmp, which is now Audience Managers. Adobe has made all these acquisitions over the last seven years, and it's just amazing what Adobe's been able to do as far as integrating the solutions and building some marketing cloud and building this vision around it. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm pretty excited to work here. It's a pretty cool company and it's. I mean, you said there's a lot to learn. There's a lot for me to learn. Every day we're working on new integrations and things within the cloud, which really excites me.
- [16:07]
B
I spent the last two days wondering where I've been, but then any listener will know I've been on the Isle of Wight, which isn't known for its digital prowess particularly. But that's just my experience, which is my story. Well, Pete, thank you so much for taking the time out and literally staying awake all night so you could talk. I feel honoured.
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C
Yes, absolutely.
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B
It's been really, really interesting. So thank you so much for the insight into the whole kind of digital advertising space and Adobe's very exciting digital marketing platform.
- [16:42]
C
Yes, thank you.
- [16:51]
A
Thanks for listening to another episode of the Digital Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Target Internet. If you'd like to get more information on the show, get hold of back issues of this podcast, or get details on any of the links we mentioned, please visit our website at www.targetinternet.com. if you've enjoyed the show, we would love to read your feedback. Please rate us in itunes or even better, write us a review. Or if you have any questions, please get in touch. We'd love to.