Utilizing The Power Of Programmatic Advertising This World Cup Season

Ashish Shah, Founder & CEO, Vertoz shares insights on 'How-To's' of effectively leveraging Programmatic advertising for your campaigns, especially, in this World Cup season for the advertisers and marketers.

Indians are
absolutely crazy about cricket. Cricket is something that cuts across all borders,
casts, and languages that fragment India. It attracts the attention of scores
of cricket-crazy Indians, making it a perfect opportunity for brands to
advertise their products and services. The ICC World Cup 2019 has already set
the ball rolling for advertisers. Its live coverage will be broadcast to more
than 1.5 billion people across the world. The numbers speak for themselves about
the strong pull that cricket has over the audiences. Indians’ love for cricket
has existed for decades and this fact won’t be changing anytime soon.

However, there is something that has definitely changed – the audience’s viewing habits. As opposed to the traditional viewing mediums like Television and Radio, audiences prefer to get the updates the digital way. Digital mediums like video streaming apps and cricket portals provide the advantage of on-the-go entertainment, which is quite attractive for young viewers, who live a fast-paced life. India’s increasing internet and mobile penetration has further facilitated digital viewing.

As per a report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB, India had about 500 million internet users, as of 2018. This trend is catching up even in the rural areas of the country. Even the millennials across tier II and III, prefer watching the matches online. This shift is due to the increasing internet penetration in rural areas, where the number stands at 186 million. Further, factors like plummeting costs of high-speed data and affordable handset prices are acting as a catalyst. The time spent on mobile is constantly on the rise. Consequently, there is a steady increase in traffic and viewing times on sports inventories. A staggering 50 million viewers viewed Team India’s recent Australian tour for a total viewing time of more than 7 billion minutes on the OTT platform SonyLIV.

As digital platforms are attracting such volumes of eyeballs, they present the perfect opportunity for the brands to reach massive numbers of audiences and to increase their brand visibility on the Internet.

But the catch here is that this deluge of viewers comprises of all audience segments – ranging from every part of the world, within a wide range of age bracket and having a huge variance of income levels. How do advertisers have relevant targeting to reach the right set of audience segments within this huge viewer base? Programmatic advertising is the solution. It enables advertisers to target the right audiences at the right time. To accomplish this, it uses advanced technologies and complex algorithms. It leverages the data-crunching capabilities of Data Management Platforms (DMPs) to target sports fans and can be used to target cricket lovers.

Also read: How to get the best from your Agency?

DMPs help with analyzing and processing data about these viewers so that targeted and personalized ads can be delivered to them at the right time and through the channels & mediums that will work the best for a particular audience segment. Advertisers can also leverage Private Marketplace (PMP) deals and Programmatic direct to directly connect cricket score platforms with advertisers.

In order to deliver highly relevant and personalized ads, brands can use the programmatic technique of Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO). This technique is used for targeting as well as for retargeting. It dynamically changes the creative copies based on the viewers’ real-time preferences and past browsing history.

Creative Management Platforms (CMPs) help in creating personalized and optimized ad copies, improving workflows, and streamlining design. The programmatic technique of geo-targeting can be used to reach out to NRI cricket lovers in countries that Indian brands prefer to target. Advertisers can deliver brand messages that are highly relevant to that particular region and geo. DMPs can help in deciding the targeting strategy i.e. when and where to target them and which channels can be used to engage them.

By providing precise targeting, programmatic advertising helps to eliminate inefficient ad impressions and channelize the ad budgets towards the right viewers.

What’s more? Programmatic advertising also helps to improve efficiency by providing granular reports. By analyzing these reports, advertisers can evaluate their campaign performance and further optimize the targeting strategy to get the maximum results. Moreover, Programmatic advertising also helps advertisers to target viewers that watch matches or score updates on multiple devices using the technique of cross-device targeting.

While this looks quite alluring, it is crucial that the brands partner with the right kind of programmatic platform. Certain potential problems like brand-safety and ad frauds may arise if brands choose the wrong platform. Brand-safety problems and transparency issues can wreak havoc for the brand image, and in turn, for the campaign. A platform that provides complete transparency and has ad fraud detection and prevention mechanisms is a good choice to partner with.

This article has been authored by Ashish Shah, Founder, and CEO of Vertoz

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