A pet project: Selling hamster art programmatically

The main audience are marketers and agency executives. Client-side marketers are also important, particularly chief marketing officers, marketing directors, heads of digital, and digital marketing directors.

However, as a side line,Tyler McFluff also offers art for the consumer market, so it was also important to raise awareness of him among the general public.

To launch the Tyler brand, AppNexus enlisted the help of one of its partners, Media iQ, to run it using AppNexus’s programmatic technology.

Programmatic advertising is still often seen as the sole preserve of direct response campaigns, despite the likes of Mondelez and Kellogg’s publicly committing to it.

The Tyler McFluff campaign saw The Drum dig into how a branding campaign could be executed effectively using programmatic technology.

“Programmatic can seem a bit opaque and, let’s face it, a bit dull if you don’t get excited about data and targeting. What we set out to do by working with The Drum to launch Tyler McFluff, as an artist and as a brand, was to show that automation is only one part of the picture,” says Graham Wylie, the EMEA & APAC senior director of marketing at AppNexus.

As a new brand, traditional digital marketing techniques weren’t appropriate. It was felt search marketing wasn’t suitable as people generally weren’t searching for hamster art. In a social world, where people have pre-intent before searching, there just wasn’t that much discussion around hamster art or the works of Tyler McFluff.

Tyler didn’t have a huge budget. Something new such as hamster art will generate buzz on social media but programmatic was the key to scaling this interest. As Wylie points out, programmatic lets a brand magnify its activity on social media and push it out to its exact audience at a time when they’re ready to buy – in this case, without wasting budget on people that aren’t interested in the frontier of modern animal art.

“To build the brand we had to go out to where people were using programmatic technology to power display advertising that was as accountable as search and as flexible as social,” adds Alexander Rincon Delgado, EMEA trader director, Media iQ.

To find the right audience, the team used first-party data from both The Drum and Tyler’s own site, tylermcfluff.com, to segment users, targeting a media audience that have shown an interest in art.

The campaign used real time data around TV and social media to understand and accurately target the audience. Programmatic let the Tyler team react to what was happening in the world in real time. For Tyler, it meant serving ads for his artwork when people were watching TV programmes about art, for instance.

Summing up the campaign, Wylie tells us: “Programmatic can change the way you tell your story; engage a niche audience to build a young brand more quickly and not suck the joy out of life in the process. Technology is a fundamental part of marketing and advertising now, so we need to find ways to demystify it and excite people by its potential. Tyler may be one of the first to build his brand programmatically, but he will not be the last.”

The Tyler McFluff campaign was documented by The Drum’s video production arm The Drum Studios and the film is available to view below.