Programmatic advertising: the marriage of creativity with technology

Victor Navarro, EMEA sales director, Media Solutions at Sizmek, shared his insights on the rise of programmatic advertising in the United Kingdom at the StrikeAd Mobile Programmatic Advertising event. Navarro urged South African advertisers to get on board with creating relevant messages for mobile users, lest they get left behind, as the days of desktop only advertising are over.
Victor Navarro

Victor Navarro

According to Navarro, humans haven’t adopted technology faster than the speed at which they’ve adopted mobile. “We’re seeing huge numbers of smartphones in developing markets including South America and even Africa,” he says. Interestingly, digital budgets are starting to shift towards mobile. “Within the next year we’ll see as high as ¾ of digital traffic will be mobile, especially in developed markets like the UK.”

As a result of mobile, consumers are “always on”, which means they can access info regardless of where they are and therefore expect messages to be relevant to them. Navarro encourages advertisers to reach their audience through the micro moments and break through the “noise” created by the many voices vying for consumers’ attention. “We need to understand the personal moment which people have on their phones and understand the context in which the consumer is engaging with their phone and then what type of communication is going to be most effective to reach them,” explains Navarro, “You shouldn’t be running mobile campaigns that aren’t based on audience insights, because then you’re regressing to the desktop days.”

Location is everything

Navarro explains that advertisers need to pay attention to consumers’ location as a way of understanding who they are as people. To get the audience thinking about location, he provided a few examples such as: are your consumers at a festival, sporting event or perhaps commuting to work?

“A recent study from Google shows that 61% of consumers are more likely to buy from a mobile site that customises information according to their location,” explains Navarro, “So, there’s been a shift to spend more on location based mobile advertising. In the next three to five years, more than 40% of spend will be dedicated to location.”

Programmatic advertising: the marriage of creativity with technology

© Karolina Grabowska via Pixabay

Navarro explained that consumer location data can be found via:

  • Apps and GPS data – “The power of mobile is location and apps are what’s driving that. GPS data can only be received via apps and very few mobile web providers share that info. When we speak to clients about wherein we buy media, in app environment is the most accurate way to leverage location to …

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