When advertisers look ahead at 2019, transparency and trust are still top priority. Consumers’ expectations for relevance are higher than ever, and more brands have realised the power of programmatic in navigating an ever-changing advertising landscape. Here, leading marketers and brands around Australia share their successes and strategies for taking programmatic marketing to the next level.
We’re just over a month into the new year, which means your plans for 2019 are already in full swing. But it’s never too late to grab some extra bits of inspiration. They might make the difference between just another year and your brand’s best year yet.
A lot of talk in 2018 revolved around the power of programmatic, especially in Australia, where premium ad inventory is limited. As people spend more time online, marketers are increasingly adopting faster, more intuitive tools to reach them with meaningful messages. They’re also rethinking the very structure of their entire organisation, breaking down silos, and forging new connections between analytics and creative teams. In 2019, the expectation for trustworthiness, transparency, and value in advertising will be more relevant than ever, and understanding the dynamics of new ad tech is crucial.
Read on to discover insights and inspiration from brand leaders around Australia who are making the most of programmatic in their marketing.
1) Striving towards digital marketing maturity
“For IAG, the key has been in creating the connections and shared understanding between marketing, digital product/development, and analytics teams. This has given us a more in-depth understanding of what actually works, enabling us to confidently cut low-value work and focus the technical integration on high-value strategies.”
Willem Paling, Director, Analytics/Customer & Growth, IAG
“Data-driven integration is like long-distance running. You need to focus on the next step rather than worry about how far you still need to go. It sounds like a cliché, but considering how many people are involved in enabling this change in an organisation, it is important to break it down into bite-size pieces and make everyone part of the journey.”
Tom Van Den Berckt, Head of Digital & Web Services, Maxis
2) Making more impact with your creative
“There’s a real shift in modern creativity … not just new technology and channels … but new ways to tell stories as well. This generation of consumers doesn’t wait for a crescendo; they’ve always had the ability to hit skip, scroll past an ad, or simply look at another screen. So the best modern creatives know there isn’t just a traditional narrative arc. They can tell stories the way their friends do, often starting with the best bits first — and in different ways for every channel.”
Aden Hepburn, MD and ECD, VMLY&R
3) Forging meaningful connections with consumers
“Combining programmatic guaranteed with data-driven creative meant we could deliver a personalised message to audiences we recognised while still serving a broad appeal creative to everyone else. By doing this, we achieved a 57% increase in click-through rate and a 170% higher conversion rate.”
Gerrit Walters, Head of Marketing, Qantas
From Australia’s Qantas uses Display & Video 360 to reach frequent flyers with relevant ads
4) Telling more timely and relevant stories
“Both online and offline, we have seen how applying a contextual layer to our creative leads to better results, and we've been able to streamline the process even more on digital with programmatic.”
Julia Donnan, Head of Hardware Marketing, Google Australia and New Zealand
From Q&A with Essence & Google: Key takeaways from a programmatic journey
“The automation of guaranteed media buys across merged data sets is an exciting development for us at Domain. This evolution has the ability to drive increased efficiencies and scale. Our clients now have the capability to sync their own data segments with Domain's premium property seeker audience, then deliver relevant creative messages to our network of sites in real time.”
Shannon Fitzpatrick, Operations & Performance Director, Domain AU
5) Freeing up resources and reaping the rewards
“When we first explored dynamic creative, our goal was to deliver the right message to the right user in an automated manner so each and every viewer will find our ads relevant, and our designers can save time from doing repetitive work. The entire creative request, review, and implementation workflow was improved.”
Dianchen Yao, Regional Growth Marketing Manager, Uber
From Uber Eats delivers timely, contextual creative to hungry Australians
