The Dish on Display

The Brand and business objectives are at the core of a marketing strategy. What are the business’s goals? How can these goals be best achieved through advertising? How much control is desired in developing the media strategy? These are all questions marketers need to answer, and there are a range of services and solution providers to help.

How will your brand decide which content, audiences, or people to target with Display ads? In the media planning and buying function, brands can choose to handle their Display strategy and tactics with an in-house marketing team, an outsourced agency or vendor, or a combination of both. In any scenario, a range of media management tools are typically used to assist in this process; for example, with site selection or billing. Once a media plan is decided, marketers purchase the media from a media vendor, either through executing an insertion order, or programmatically through real-time bidding.

Where will your agency or in-house team choose to purchase Display inventory from? A media vendor is the channel through which a marketer gains access to Display ad inventory. To execute a media plan, media vendors are selected by who can best provide inventory to reach a brand’s goals. The types of media vendors include publishers, ad networks, exchanges, full-service demand-side platforms (DSPs), and agency trading desks (ATDs). For example, if the marketer chooses to work with an ad network, even though an ad network is an intermediary between a marketer and publisher, the media vendor in this scenario is the ad network. Alternatively, if the marketer chooses to work directly with a publisher, then the publisher in this scenario is the media vendor.

What technology will you use to target, bid on, and serve your Display ads? Execution technologies are involved in actually serving the ordered Display impression; and in the case of programmatic buying, the technologies involved in bidding on a Display impression. A marketer could choose to let a publisher, ad network or full-service DSP serve their creative directly for example. And to deliver ads in a more centralized, controlled, optimized, and targeted fashion across many media vendors including DSPs, marketers may leverage a third-party ad server. To execute real-time bidding placements, marketers and their agencies or vendors may also choose to use a self-serve DSP technology.

What enhancements will you leverage to improve your targeting, tracking, bidding, and creative to generate better results and higher quality placement? Media enhancement solutions make Display advertising campaigns more effective. Traditional examples of enhancements include creative optimization (such as dynamic creative) and rich media. Over the last several years, a number of point solutions have entered the Display landscape to provide campaign enhancements, while more traditional technologies have been slowly adding enhancements to their stack. These include the tools and solutions needed to help marketers build and leverage a more complete view of a brand’s customer and prospective customers. Tag management solutions make it easier to gather on-site marketing data, data management platforms (DMPs) store this data for targeting, and data suppliers help marketers augment a brand’s first-party data. Verification services give marketers more transparency into where their ads are serving in order to improve the quality of their placements. And privacy services give consumers more transparency and control regarding how brands target them. None of these enhancements are requirements for Display marketing, but they can help build and maintain a more engaging, higher quality and personalized approach to Display advertising.

How effective is your Display marketing? Marketers need business intelligence tools for analyzing data across their marketing efforts. Marketing reporting and analytics solutions provide critical information about how ads and digital marketing are performing. Site measurement and analytics solutions track and analyze visitor behavior once they’ve reached a brand’s site. Attribution analytics determine how cross-channel marketing efforts played a role in driving conversions.