Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Bruno Režek, CEO, Produkcija Pokret
Internet marketing today is quite sophisticated – with each of our engagements online we voluntarily fill a questionnaire based on which the profile of our “purchasing personality” is built. Apart from the data we provide to Google, Facebook or any other third party – like the name, gender and age – extremely interesting are the sites we visit. Monitoring the content that we visit is the most accurate way to define our interests.
If this is all obvious, why am I today targeted with advertising for pregnant women on the most visited portal in Croatia?
Now that the headline clickbait is justified, I hope that enough attention has remained in you for the rest of this article, its true subject being the use of new technologies – in this case, programmatic.
What does programmatic do?
In layman’s terms, programmatic represents buying of lists of Internet users who are identified by category (interest / location / age / etc.) that suits you.
Example: You sell bikes in the extreme sports category. The process of buying lists of people who read content related to cycling extreme sports, and advertising to them, is called programmatic. The whole process can be very advanced and automated, but at its core that’s all it is.
If you have ever set-up a display campaign in Adwords, which is based on interests, you’ve actually already done your first programmatic campaign, because in this process you technically bought a list of people that Google had profiled by interests.
If programmatic is so great, then what’s the problem?
The focus has remained on buying media, instead of creating your own media. The TV mentality has crept into the Internet era – the same one that drew the audience, battered by ads, to run away to the Internet.
This is why some kid with amateur content on their YouTube channel or blog has a larger list of your potential customers than you do. If you think you are advanced because you started using programmatic, remember that kid whom you fund, because he has demonstrated a greater ability to create attractive content and become a branded media channel. And hope that he won’t begin selling the same things as you, because your ads are just an obstacle on the way to his content.
It’s certain that most of these new technologies has enormous potential, but there’s a difference between tactics and strategy. Technologies such as programmatic can easily be implemented in strategies, but it needs to be done in the right place with the right sense. Tactics are based on hitting the people in the purchasing stage, and strategies revolve around developing long-term plans to strengthen the brand.
Strengthening the brand and the brand itself can often be presented in some abstract terms. Marketers love that (Make it BIGGER!). One of the simpler analogies that I found is explained through emotional capital.
Every time a customer consumes your content, and receives some value from it, you earn the emotional capital – and every time you ask something from them, you spend that emotional capital.
Emotional capital is the main currency for strengthening the brand. This means that with unwanted advertising you are actually spending your brand. That’s why kids are holding our audience. Because they earn mountains of emotional capital, while the big players were spending it.
And here we come to the dramatic question for the end: Do you want to continue stopping people on the way to other people’s valuable content, or are you going to create your own?