Recently Google announced that you can run programmatic advertising through Doubleclick on their partner sites. Now let’s break it down…
What is Doubleclick you ask?
Doubleclick is Google’s display advertising business. It serves and delivers adverts, as well as targeting users based on behaviour. Google profits from it through online advertisers and publishers.
For example, online publishers use Doubleclick to display ads on their websites. Advertisers use it to control how often, how long for, what size, shape or artwork their ad is showing.
Okay…got that! What’s programmatic advertising?
Programmatic media buying is essentially software that enables purchasing of digital advertising. The traditional process involves, quotations, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders. Programmatic advertising automates this process.
Programmatic advertising has become so popular lately as it is very efficient, reliable and more cost effective, particularly through removing the human resources from the process. Does that mean that the software replaces any need for humans? No…a person still needs to strategize and optimize so human capital still needs to be involved.
Now let’s talk about native advertising…
Native advertising is paid advertising that fits the look and feel of publisher content and looks natural in this environment. Some of the most common ad formats that fit this definition are advertorials or promoted or sponsored posts on social media.
How do these all fit together?
Programmatic advertising has always been about the transaction of standard formats and sizes but native doesn’t work that way. What Google has built is quite impressive. It must have been quite an engineering challenge to fit the ad assets i.e. links, content, artwork etc. into every publisher’s spec. But did they manage to pull it off?
What does it mean for publishers?
What Google has actually created is based on two standard templates to use native programmatic advertising for publishers: one for content marketing and one for app ads. Publishers have had to consider these templates in their website design and build in the necessary technology, if they didn’t have it, if they wanted to remain in the game. Focusing exclusively on publisher-created sponsored content isn’t a viable option for most publishers.
It’s important to understand that the native advert formats offered by Doubleclick are not complete articles: although they include an image, headline and text, they’re very short and are completely different from the advertorial style of native advertising that presents promotional content in a similar format to a site’s editorial.
Pros and Cons for you
Given Google’s scale, this move will definitely encourage brands to jump onto adopting a native ad inventory. In the past native advertising has proven to outperform display advertising, not just through CTR but also through post-click engagement. So if you’re not using native advertising currently and digital advertising is an important part of your marketing strategy, it’s time to consider it. Native advertising gives you more freedom as It’s not only banners and MPUs. Now you can give users a better experience and get better results by going native.
However, some say that native and programmatic advertising are two opposing terms. Native is all about bespoke integrated content whereas programmatic is very much an automated process that fits all platforms.
According to IAB’s (Interactive Advertising Bureau) 2015 State of B2B Programmatic Research Study, 54% of B2B marketers were buying advertising programmatically and 78% of b2b marketers were planning to spend up to 50% of their budget on programmatic advertising in 2016.
So if you need help to take your advertising strategies to the next level contact us!
