Three-quarters of marketers plan to increase programmatic brand spend in the next year, but financial transparency is biggest factor holding the practice back, according to a survey conducted by programmatic advertising specialists, Infectious Media.
“These results highlight that brand marketers are now well aware of the benefits of programmatic advertising”, states Martin Kelly, Infectious Media’s CEO and co-founder. “It allows advertisers to use data to make smarter buying decisions and with large, premium ad formats now available programmatically it’s a shrewd investment”.
However, at the same time, two-thirds (65%) of marketers cite ‘lack of transparency of financials’ as the main barrier to really increasing programmatic ad spend.
“Although marketers plan to put more investment into programmatic, it’s clear transparency is still an issue”, explains Martin. “The IAB forecast¹ programmatic would account for nearly half of display advertising last year, so imagine how high it could be in 2015 if transparency wasn’t an issue.”
The complexity of the ecosystem (cited by 55% of marketers) and lack of appropriate measurements (50%) are the next most significant barriers to increasing programmatic spend. ‘Lack of trust in agency relationship’ and ‘lack of transparency of delivery’ were both cited by 45% of marketers.
Increasing sales seen as biggest boost from programmatic
Increasing sales is seen as the biggest advantage of programmatic (cited by 75% of marketers) followed by the ability to personalise ad messages and to make use of CRM data (both cited by 65%).
Biggest opportunities and what marketers want to know most about
Marketers regard ‘synching of on and offline campaigns’ as the biggest opportunity (55%) around programmatic in the next 6-12 months, followed by ‘connecting up of new data sources’ (50%) and programmatic video (45%). Programmatic TV was cited by 40%.
“One of the holy grails of online marketing has always been to join up measurement of what we do online with what happens in the physical world of stores where many brands live”, states Martin. “In 2015 measurement of this type will finally start to become a reality”.
‘How to form a programmatic strategy’ is the area of programmatic marketers most want to know more about (85%) followed by the players in the ecosystem (65%) and how other businesses have been successful using programmatic (55%).
“Brands are struggling to build a programmatic advertising strategy that fits into a wider media mix and marketing plan”, says Martin. “It’s up to us as an industry to provide the guidance they need to overcome this challenge.”
To help marketers, Infectious Media has released a best practice guide on how to ‘Grow Brand Awareness with Programmatic’.