Dubai: Browse any website and you will come across all manner of digital ads that could promise anything from gift vouchers to “unbeatable” pricing on the latest gadget at an e-tailing portal. But there is an element of hit-and-miss about such ads. But these days, it’s hard to miss the more targeted ads which show up based on your browsing preferences and thus stand a better chance of connecting with you.
Welcome then into the world of “programmatic buying”, with the region’s digital ad industry seeing a whole lot more of it in the future. It is “gaining traction because advertisers have seen the effectiveness of eliminating waste by buying only the impressions [an industry measure on the number of times a digital ad is seen] that match their target audience,” said Roli Okoro, the AOD (Audience on Demand) Director at VivaKi MENA.
“While some publishers may be reluctant to give up direct relationships with buyers, many are seeing the benefits of programmatic buying. Publishers are able to maintain a floor price for their inventory [and] as this technology evolves, it will become ever easier to ease their concerns such as maintaining ad quality.”
More recently, programmatic buying has also been able, gradually, to overcome certain regional sensitivities. For instance, in Saudi Arabia, brands used to be reluctant to use programmatic buying since they had concerns over where their ad might land. However, the technology has now moved on that it now allows for networks to have “filters” that can avoid such websites, and many agencies are now using this. It wasn’t the case even a year ago.
But what could help the whole process of finding the ideal website for the right ad is relevant data about the consumers. There is still a sizable gap that exists on this count.
“The absence of a local third-party data company populating regional data — and selling that data programmatically and in the real-time bidding environment — means that AOD MENA mainly uses clients’ first-party data,” said Okoro.
“AOD has been in talks with data companies in the region and we are close to partnering with a regional data company to build data management platforms for our clients.
“There are global players... but as data wasn’t populated specifically for the region, we don’t consider that data valid and, as such, don’t recommend this to our clients. We are however able to help advertisers segment their audience based on user behavior on the site and serve these users with ads specific to their interest on the advertiser site.”
According to Okoro, the recently released Google’s Affinity segment has helped address the lack of local behavioral third-party data. It allows trading desks to access segments of users on the Google Ad-Exchange.
But there is always the chance that customers would not want to share all of their details — doesn’t this hinder prospects of collecting relevant info? “As we mainly utilise first-party advertiser data for client campaigns — which is done by placing tags on the advertiser page and collecting cookie data — a user who has decided to ‘opt out’ is not included in the audience pool,” said Okoro.
“AOD does not aim to overwhelm the user with re-targeted ads. We have frequency caps in place, which addresses this issue. If a user doesn’t respond within the specific cap in place, we generally have a cooling off period before testing again. Setting this across all publishers as opposed to the traditional way of going directly with each publisher ensures that the cap is applied regardless of site.”
