Opinion

Programmatic jargon, in plain English

ProgrammaticStill a little befuddled by programmatic? In this guest post, Gavin Buxton attempts to untangle a few of the most important terms.

The ad tech stack can be confusing for some people.

Media buying has transformed from a simple exchange, to a tangled multi-channel, multi-layer, on-demand world driven by automation. Don’t get me wrong, programmatic has introduced more efficient ways to reach our customers anywhere any time – but as with all things automated, it still carries a certain level of uncertainty, which requires further education.

The uncertainty is whether you’re actually getting a return from your advertising investment. The only way to be sure is by using more accurate indicators of ROI, such as post-click measurements that can qualify engagement and conversions.

Limiting your KPIs to CTRs and CPMs increases a publisher’s chance of being hit by bot traffic. Ad fraud has already lost publishers US$7.2 Billion globally, and while there are many causes, one of the biggest reasons is a lack of transparency between agencies, publishers and advertisers on how views are measured, and some of the language used when decision-makers are choosing programmatic partners.

Currently, 70 per cent of marketers in APAC use or plan to use programmatic (according to Emarketer); however, 43 per cent report insufficient internal expertise was holding them back.

It’s essential that brands choose a programmatic partner that understands the importance of transparency and only pay for real viewable impressions and true engagements. One of the first things you can do, is get a universal understanding of the process to ensure you get a real ROI from your ad campaigns.

But the last thing the internet needs is another dictionary of programmatic that requires a thesaurus to understand.

So, we’ve written a programmatic jargon translator. In English.

Jargon: Programmatic

Translation: Automating anything in an orderly fashion.

Jargon: Programmatic buying

Translation: Traditionally, we used to buy media in the hope of reaching a targeted audience. Now with programmatic, advertisers can directly buy targeted audiences. Ads were sold in bulk and each impression cost the same – that’s a lot of money wasted. Programmatic lets you actually buy an actual specific audience group and media is traded by impressions.

So, you can go to an auction and say ‘I’ll pay $xx for that inventory’. It’s revolutionary because you get to retarget an audience that didn’t buy in the first place but showed some interest.

Programmatic makes advertising more efficient by digitally connecting the buyer (an advertiser) and the seller (a publisher) using trading platforms. There’s less ad spend wasted because data lets you pick exactly to whom and when you deliver your ad.

Jargon: Real-time bidding (RTB)

Translation: Say you’re a Chinese athlete from Beijing loading up the Time Out Beijing homepage. In a microsecond the webpage knows who you are based on your behaviour (location, browser, time of day, login info), and sells the data to an advertiser like Nike because they bid for you in real time. By now the page is fully loaded, you see a Nike ad for the store nearest you in Beijing on the Time Out website.

Wait, what’s the difference between programmatic and RTB, you ask.

RTB is just a subset of programmatic. Programmatic doesn’t have to happen in real time.

Jargon: MRC (Media Rating Council)

Translation: With ad fraud running rampant in the industry, the MRC are lawmakers of digital advertising, who police the industry by setting the standard for what a billable ad impression is. If an agency is MRC-accredited that means their impressions are legitimately seen by humans and not bots.

Jargon: Bot

Translation: The hipster name for robot. Since publishers generate revenues from ad impressions or clicks, the less honest of them could deploy automated programs to create fake impressions/clicks to drive additional revenues. Bots are at the heart of ad fraud concerns in the industry.

Jargon: DSP (Demand Side Platform)

Translation: Programmatic is nothing without its tech platforms. DSPs are the companies that automate the buying process across a bunch of different data suppliers all in one place. Media agencies use DSPs to do all the haggling in the ad market for them. It lets agencies optimise inventory across multiple vendors.

So what’s the point, you ask.

DSPs reduce media wastage by targeting audiences and allow you to scale your campaign. You need a good DSP to ensure transparency in your campaign.

Jargon: SSP (Sale Side Platform)

Translation: This is the mirror image of the DSP, except instead of buying inventory, SSPs help publishers sell it. If DSPs help agencies get the cheapest price, SSPs try to sell for the highest price through auctions.

SSPs help publishers to get the most bids from buyers for the most amount of money. Why would you hire a company to do this? Because SSPs do this for a living. It would take you way too long to figure out. The SSPs will help publishers bring in advertisers who are willing to pay for it.

Jargon: MRC viewability standard

Translation: The current standard from the MRC (see above) for the industry for what counts as a real view by a human being on desktop and mobile devices (50% of pixels loaded and one second for display ad impressions). If half the pixels are loaded on the page for at least one second, that counts as seen by a human. This is also a standard supported by the IAB.

In layman’s terms, an ad is fully seen when 50% of the format appears on the user’s smartphone screen. While this is the accepted industry standard – we think you get the most bang for your buck when you have accredited partners that count viewability at 100% pixels loaded + 1 second. This way you are sure that 100% of the ad format appears on the smartphone screen of your audience.

Jargon: Conventional media buying

Translation: The way we used to buy and sell ads was very basic. We would buy ads in bulk and every impression was the same, because at the time, all audiences were treated the same. The reverse of conventional media buying is audience buying. With increased use of mobile devices and the internet, we’ve got an explosion of mobile behavioural data. With this data we can target exactly who we want and buy audiences instead of media.

Jargon: Data Management Platform (DMP)

Translation: There are lots of data and platforms flying around. A DMP makes life easier and lets you control and contain audiences so you can create audience profiles. It sorts out what’s first, second, and third party data. It puts everything on a pretty dashboard so publishers have a clear view of their data.

The benefit? The DMP is like a giant brain that can learn to make better buying decisions. DMPs have carefully organised supply-side information that can help the demand side pick what they’re bidding over.

Jargon: Full stack technology

Translation: If you’re on the buy-side and are looking for a programmatic partner, you might hear an agency say ‘hey we are full stack!’

This means the agency offers full service to the advertiser. They do everything from the DSP ad inventory bidding, to the creative design of the ad, to the reporting, to the tracking and analytics, all in one place and not sourced to different partners.

Then, the data management platform makes sure that the campaign is constantly learning and improving to get the best ROI.

 

Gavin Buxton

Gavin Buxton

Here’s the honest truth from an agency: Not everyone in the boardroom understands the jargon, buzzwords, and breathless sentences of an ad exchange. But few advertisers are going to put their hand up during a client meeting and say, ‘Sorry can you explain how to pick the right DSP?’.

Without transparency between advertisers, agencies, and tech partners, brands will not realise the full ROI potential from their programmatic investments.

Gavin Buxton is vice president of sales, APAC, S4M

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