Chris Bourke, Qriously, commercial director, EMEA, explains how employing mobile and programmatic can help marketeers solve problems foisted upon them by social media.

How does an industry that warns brand marketers “correlation is not causality” expect to woo their budget? This is the language of the bespectacled few who ran to stats class to get a front row seat. Future brand managers were spending this time in bed. Let’s cross over into their world.

The act of 'branding' has always been a considered exercise. The business of developing positive perception for a product or service ­ in the hearts & minds of consumers ­ is a long term strategy and there are many elements to plan such as messaging, values, personality ­ even the number of times a phone should ring before answering a customer's call and of course advertising.

However, in a world where customers can have their perception of a brand changed overnight by a single viral tweet, taking time to plan a brand strategy across digital channels is a luxury that marketers are fast beginning to realise they can ill afford. In response to this, modern digital branding strategies incorporate mechanisms to rapidly influence people’s perceptions at scale.

For example, Cadbury in the UK has implemented a real­-time marketing strategy executed by a team of round­-the-­clock marketers. This crack group are tasked with responding rapidly to external media events with tactical advertising that can be distributed at scale through paid media.

If branding strategy is changing in response to consumers' use of real-­time platforms then by
extension our approach to advertising should also adapt. For paid media to successfully
influence the way people think about brands, it must be capable of equalising the impact of any
real-­time messages that move the brand equity needle in the wrong direction. And to do this,
advertising must be delivered at a pace ­ and at a scale ­ that matches the fire hose of real-time
consumer messages; paid media bought and delivered manually is far too slow.

It is at this point that programmatic media steps in. Long perceived as a technology built to
exclusively support direct response campaigns, it is now beginning to flex its brand building
muscles, and the digital media planning rule book is being torn up in the process.

Using real-time bidding (RTB) it is possible to find people extremely quickly; at Qriously we frequently find all of the unique eyeballs that a brand has asked to purchase on day one of a campaign’s period. This is in contrast to non-­programmatic delivery where consumers are found at a small fixed number per day, ­a capped approach like this is simply not suited to the demands of real time marketing.

Frequency best practice must also be reconsidered. To really influence perception we need to
expose consumers to ads at frequencies far in excess of the three to seven generally accepted, and frequencies of 15 or more are not untypical. And this must be done over a short period of time; ­hours and days, not weeks and months. With this approach brand stories at scale can then be written across the app ecosystem.

But before brands begin to adopt mobile RTB as part of their brand building armoury a number of
myths must be dispelled:

1. Mobile programmatic inventory is not suited to branding

Brands typically want to build their equity with premium content that attracts their audience but
when advertising needs to respond to real-time events this approach is not agile enough.

Advertisers need media channels that are used by consumers at high frequency. So when you consider that the average mobile handset is picked up 150 times a day, smartphone apps are ideal. Many mobile app titles are now household names in their own right. For example, just think of Shazam, Words with Friends & Draw Something. ­The frequency of usage of these apps allows advertisers to manage brand perception at a pace that matches rapid real-time events.

2. Brand metrics cannot be driven programmatically

Mobile programmatic, in the minds of brand marketers who claim to understand it well,  ­is a tool for high frequency delivery of basic format ads across digital platforms. But programmatic has matured and now delivers large formats & video for rich engagement at scale. This gives brands the high impact delivery they demand to push consumers down the funnel toward intent.

Many of our clients have discovered that even modest 320x50 mobile banners can influence funnel
metrics when the frequency dial is turned up beyond seven.

3. No way to measure lift in brand metrics

Brands have traditionally relied on long form multi level questions to determine consumer response to advertising, but delivering advertising in response to real­-time events requires a means of ROI measurement that is far more agile.

There is a perceptible shift in parts of the research industry away from multi question surveys to single compact questions, but this shift is at a scale where the volume of responses collected statistically compensates for their modest depth. At Qriously, we adopt a single question approach to measure brand lift as close to real-­time as possible.

Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting a wholesale transfer of brand budget to mobile programmatic is imminent. The programmatic cheetah isn't taking the lion that is TV down any time soon.

Rather, programmatic can help marketeers with a new problem. A problem that has been foisted
upon them by social media. Looking to the future, advertisers will increasingly seek ways to gain
efficiencies and the next logical step is cutting out the human element and programmatically
integrating social media events with RTB across exchanges to deliver automated artificial intelligence written brand stories at scale.

Oops, I just lost the last brand manager reading this post...