Delivering the multi-screen vision - Xaxis UK MD Nicolas Bidon
Ahead of the Drum's first Digital Trading Awards next week Nicolas Bidon, managing director for UK, Xaxis, argues that data and programmatic technologies will bring truly holistic multi-screen campaigns sooner than you may expect.
Last month, research by eMarketer revealed that for the first time UK ad spend on mobile would eclipse that for newspapers in 2014, with £2.3bn spent on mobile ads versus just £1.9bn for newspapers. Even having witnessed the phenomenal growth of mobile in recent years, it’s breath-taking to see such milestones reached.
However, while this growth is hugely encouraging, mobile has still some way to go before it fulfills its true potential. Today, mobile is still being planned and bought as a separate channel. As long as this siloed approach to media buying continues, mobile investments won’t deliver their true value to advertisers nor will publishers see these revenues develop as they might.
Buying a channel in isolation is disconnected from today’s reality of media consumption and consumer journeys. Today, users move constantly throughout the day between their tablets, mobile, laptops or desktops and the TV screen.
The IAB reported that with the increased adoption of multiple connected devices, the propensity to either switch between devices or use several concurrently increases (65% of tablet users they surveyed say that using their tablet while watching TV was the norm).
More importantly, customers’ purchasing activity also occurs between devices – originating on one screen and finishing on another. For example, you may research flights and hotels for your holiday on your mobile, but make the final booking on your desktop PC.
Given that this new behaviour in media consumption is fairly widely understood, why aren’t brands and advertisers creating campaigns that are similarly agile? Why don’t we have campaigns that can keep up with consumers on their journey through media platforms?
In fact, there have been significant barriers to seamlessly engaging audiences across screens. These include the limitation of current targeting methodology via cookies, fragmentation of the tech stack and ad formats, and limited scale and adoption of cross-screen audience validation solutions.
The good news is that there is progress. Programmatic technologies and data have already enabled companies like Xaxis to deliver on the promise of true holistic audience planning, allowing us to buy digital audiences at scale and move away from site-by-site planning. Likewise, new cross-screen targeting methods and technologies, along with richer data insights will soon give us the ability to help brands plan and engage with their audiences holistically across all screens, rather than in a siloed fashion.
Making this vision a reality is our goal at Xaxis. This is why in January we launched the Xaxis Brand Suite in the UK - a step in the right direction allowing advertisers to seamlessly reach and measure audiences across a wide variety of channels and formats including in-stream video, rich media, and display on desktops, tablets and mobile.
Such developments will continue to open up new opportunities and demand new skills in our industry such as sequential marketing and cross channel optimisation, as marketers strive to achieve the vision of delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time on the right screen.
By making it increasingly possible to address all of these channels through a single powerful Data Management Platform, Xaxis is actively shaping this new multi-channel reality. I cannot wait to see what award winning campaigns will come out of this integrated view of our customers’ audiences.
The Drum is launching the Digital Trading Awards to reward clarity, transparency and client service when it comes to digital advertising. Find out more at digitaltradingawards.com.