“I’ll meet you near Jumbo King.” I say and hang up, as I half-run and half-walk up the stairs, for the metro. And for the first time in a long time, I scan hoardings and advertisements at the station. Funnily, all the words on the sign boards looked like a slur to me, because all I cared was for “Jumbo King”.
It’s no shocker that it’s raining information and data everywhere you go – whether a metro station, a website or even a mobile app. And as a conservative shopper and a digital-first consumer of today, I’m hardly ever enthralled by hoardings or digital adverts. Unless of course the ads are relevant to me.
I must however give it up for all the random brands that seem to target me with digital ads on apps that I use and websites that I visit often. I say “seem” because I should not have ideally been targeted. Why? Because I’m highly capable of going blind to certain ads that are not significant to me. So psychology describes selective attention as the ability to react selectively when multiple things occur at the same time. See, what I’m trying to say? People are rarely attentive to ads that don’t address their current “consumer” problems. And when app users or website visitors go blind to ads, those are lost impressions for advertisers/marketers.
Here’s what makes a user go blind to digital ads:
Timing: I’m on a mobile dictionary app at 11:30 PM, looking up “lackadaisical”. And a pop-up ad of a local mart seizes my screen. Why! I wonder. Like, why trigger that ad then?
Solution: I’d prefer being targeted by a local mart when I’m on an ecommerce site looking up products that the mart offers too. Oh and, for a dictionary app, shouldn’t you know me any better? Show me ads of books I should buy or read and certainly not of local marts and certainly not when I’m working on my etymology game.
Location: I’m on my way to work, hungrily consuming all of the content Instagram has brought up on my news feed. And there I see sponsored content of an illustrator (I’m talking about a human illustrator and not the software). And I wonder why the illustrator guy targeted me at that hour? Is there no research done before adding me to your “preferred audience segment” for targeting?
Solution: If an illustrator or an artist wants to target me, show me your stuff when I search for “things to do on a weekend”. Invite me over for a workshop. How about that for a preference?
Intention: I need a pair of high-tops, I search for my all time fave black Chucks at malls. I visit ecommerce websites and apps looking for “black converse”. But somehow, I still have a lot of random fashion ads shown to me when I’m on Tinder. And not those of the product I’m genuinely interested in. Why?
Solution: Dear Converse, I need you! Reach out to me. I’m a social person and I’m open to meeting ads of the high-tops you sell on mobile apps!
Conclusion: Just as there is a need to advertise, there is also a need to personalize and humanize the ads shown to today’s consumers (like you and I).
It is evident that a lot of advertisers and media buyers want to create a “top of mind awareness” for their brands given the rising importance of advertising.
However, consumers like us are sure to appreciate humanized ads and content. Ad publishers need to equip themselves with insights and data to serve their audience relevant content and ads that plausibly address their real-life consumer needs. This is essentially why a Data Management Platform (DMP) becomes the trusted confidant of an established publisher.
What is a Data Management Platform (DMP)?
A Data Management Platform or a DMP is a piece of software that gathers, organizes, stores and pumps out information to benefit marketers and publishers. In human language, it can be defined as the single, easy solution to all data related problems. Today in advertising the lines between a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) and a DMP are beginning to blur because a lot of the DSP providers offer their clients DMP features.
So How Does A DMP Benefit A Publisher?
Audience Monetization & Inventory Monetization:
Understanding your audience and segmenting of the same helps the publisher build ad packages based on features like shopping intent, business profiles and location data. This in turn helps advertisers and buyers discover pockets of audience who truly need their products or services.
Publishers also get to effectively segment their inventories (premium and remnant) and achieve a rule-based control to define audiences to distribute ads to ad exchanges, SSPs, DSPs, networks, and agencies.
With the DMP, traffic monetization becomes easy for publishers as the audience insights permit them to sell behaviourally targeted placements on remnant and premium inventories for higher eCPMs.
Audience Analytics & Audience Segmentation:
For starters, DMPs, help publishers gather first party data and third-party data. This means publishers get insights from people’s interactions with mobile apps, websites, social media, email, search, and the various forms of digital ad campaigns.
The abundance of data can be segmented and organized based on actions, demographics and interests of the publisher’s audience. With the roll up of relevant audience segments, publishers get to respond to advertisers’ RFPs with ready “custom audience segments”.
Humanized Marketing & Personalized Advertising:
A DMP helps the publisher understand its audience better. Imagine being able to match an individual with an ad of a product on your website/app (if you’re a publisher). When ads and content become relevant to people, in other words when ads talk about the real-time, real-life “consumer” needs of an individual, it immediately catches their eye and perhaps earn clicks too. Insights give publishers a leg up to serve their audience with engaging content and relevant ads.
What To Look For In A DMP?
Data portability: The DMP must offer a media-agnostic portability of data to give publisher all the power to control and analyze cross-channel and cross-media data.
Easy integration: The DMP should permit an easy integration of the publisher’s first party data into ad servers and SSPs.
Platform reliability: The DMP should allow a publisher to understand how specific audiences interact across multiple digital properties, and generate reports showing the data attributes associated specific audiences.
