Curated audiences: Hit the holiday shopping bullseye
A several-month-long shopping season has descended upon us, with e-commerce a primary channel in the battle for consumer spend. There’s been a lot of talk about digital video being the most powerful ad technique to move the sales needle, as audience targeting becomes more precise. But, as a brand trying to capture a share of the spend, maximizing the effectiveness of video across screens and a fragmented publisher landscape is no easy feat.
To help make this task easier, the next phase in the evolution of programmatic marketplaces has entered the video market, making it possible for buyers to reach curated audiences. With the introduction of Curated Marketplaces built around advertiser needs, like viewability rates, audience characteristics, device types or content verticals, the complexity of targeting can be greatly reduced. A variation of private marketplaces, Curated Marketplaces are created with video inventory from multiple publishers, by packaging it into groups based on common audience or content categories, demographic profiles or performance-based metrics, like viewability. The marketplace is presented to the buyer under a single Group Deal ID, increasing efficiencies for media owners and advertisers.
When you talk to the people at the agencies who set up and buy through private marketplaces, there can be a lot of pain in scaling Deal ID-based media executions. By grouping inventory based on a buyer’s KPIs and audience targets into a single Curated Marketplace, it effectively neutralizes the publisher specific challenges that can cause friction in scaling private marketplace buys.
Curated Marketplaces also provide more clarity for publishers regarding the needs of programmatic media buyers. The Deal IDs representing Curated Marketplaces are ‘always on’, so when a publisher’s inventory qualifies, they can approach the buyer for inclusion and activate an incremental source of programmatic demand.
Holiday Shopping Curated Marketplaces
For the holiday season, a range of contextual, target-specific verticals can be set up to align with holiday shopping behavior. For example, it’s possible to target users that have a higher propensity to shop in-store or online, in addition to simply targeting audience demographics.
For Thanksgiving, many advertisers are looking to cooking/food verticals, given how actively Americans are consuming this type of content leading up to the big feast. Similarly, for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, specific audiences can be curated based on key characteristics.
By using the right data, it’s possible to customize a Curated Marketplace for any type of product or KPI. For example, for electronics retailers SpotX could curate sites with “tech” content and pull stats on publishers that have an audience with a high propensity to purchase electronics. We’d then cross reference Moat viewability data to ensure the we only include inventory that aligns with the advertiser’s viewability KPI.
With more than $630 billion in sales during 2015’s holiday season, the potential return from a well-executed holiday campaign is huge. A Curated Marketplace is the best way to discover, target and reach your customers across every device this season.
Kelly McMahon is vice president of Global Demand Operations, SPOTX
Similar issues and topics will be covered during The Drum's Programmatic Punch event in London next month.