After dozens of meetings with clients in various countries of Central and South America, I find a general consensus and that is that Programmatic DOES NOT WORK!! Then I ask them a few questions to understand their experiences with Programmatic and the conclusion I always come to is that they have not been well advised or the campaigns have not been well implemented.
Although it is true that programmatic is a way to do effective digital marketing, most of the time they want to compare their results with Social Media or Google Search and there lies the first mistake, each Platform has a specific mission. Programmatic works best when it is part of a good media mix to maximize results and share data between platforms but the results will always be different.
The second mistake is the duration of the campaigns and the consistency, it is very common to hear that they did a 15-day test and it went wrong, 15 days is not enough time to measure a digital medium, either because the Implementation takes a lot of these days but above all because they don’t give the platforms time to work as they should work, DSPs are powerful software programs full of algorithms that, using machine learning and artificial intelligence, optimize campaigns on a daily basis and collect data in order to achieve the objectives.
The third very common error is the lack of measurement or an erroneous measurement. Although Google Analytics is used by most advertisers, there is a serious problem and that is that GA is not made to count conversions that do not come as a result of a click, with which attribution models based on views or conversion windows they are punished in GA and those conversions end up assigned to others, directly, or to Google search because they don’t use conversion pixels for programmatic.
Fourth mistake is the lack of a reliable Ad Server. Most advertisers do not use their own Ad Server and blindly believe in the results reported by Facebook, Search, emails, but as
programmatic does not measure it with an independent Ad Server, they do not believe the results.
Finally, and with all due respect to my colleagues, there is the issue of the quality of the inventory and the audiences that are purchased, the DSPs that they use and the reports that they deliver to clients. Unfortunately, in our industry it is very easy to deceive a client, they are sold a campaign supposedly with the right audiences, they are given a super low CPM price, and at the end of the campaign they are given a report in excel, the client does not see results and returns the phrase Programmatic DOES NOT WORK!
It is strange that in digitally developed countries such as the US and England, among others, investment in Programmatic grows and grows, almost equaling spending on social media and search. Could it be that they are deceived? Big global brands like P&G, Unilever, Coca-Cola spend a large part of their budgets on programmatic.
Programmatic is today the most efficient way to buy media with a lot of room to grow, now not only the display part is available as many people think, but you can also buy TV, Radio,
Exteriors, etc.
TCL’s mission is to make advertisers believe in programmatic again, we want to do things right, with measurement and with results, with world-renowned platforms and above all with a team of professionals committed to their clients.
