This Tuesday, our very own Rebecca Muir, chaired the Programmatic Roundtable hosted by xAd, the global location marketplace, in partnership with online advertising firm, Rubicon. Attended by leaders from agency trading desks, publishers, media owners, demand side platforms such as Amnet, Essence, Mindshare, Media IQ and Zoopla.

With mobile creating a new world of marketing, it is possible to reach consumers in the moment. This shift in consumer behaviour led discussions around a range of programmatic issues: from the impact of increasing mobile user consumption on the advertising industry through to whether location data and measurement hold the key to mobile ROI.

Imran Khan, head of programmatic & partnerships, EMEA at xAd shares his key takeaways from the Programmatic Roundtable debates.

Mobile continues to be central to our lives and the rate at which technology moves makes it both exciting and difficult to predict. With UK programmatic display ad spend expected to surpass £2bn in 2016, according to eMarketer, media and marketing professionals simply cannot ignore this trend.

The difficulty is that we are living in a media and technology flux and keeping up with consumers in a radically changing digital world is no easy feat. There is little room to slip up; well-judged marketing technology investments, sophisticated customer data aggregation and constant openness to new creative techniques are all core components of effective marketing.

Industry reactions to changing consumer behaviour

Ask any of our panel in which channel they have increased their investment over the past five years and their answer is “mobile”. Mobile has surfaced as the glue that can bind online and offline offerings to create a seamless customer experience, opening up huge new revenue opportunities for brands. Why? Because mobile is incredibly versatile.

By overlaying a huge number of consumer touchpoints, mobile allows marketers to think about how each channel can complement the other to deliver a better experience to the end customer. The consumer path-to-purchase is fundamentally changing and mobile is creating new shopping habits – not just directly, but as a facilitator to incremental sales through other channels. But this doesn’t mean that cracking the world of m-commerce is an easy feat. With greater pressure for personalised and relevant ad campaigns on mobile, marketers need to make sure they understand this evolving type of mobile consumer.

And neither can we forget the 'app-y consumer'. Our attendees noted the growing number of consumers engaging with apps, particularly young people. Millennials around the world have each downloaded between 20-25 mobile apps, on average, according to research by Oracle. For marketers to be relevant to this demographic in years to come, they need to commit to providing a great app experience; especially when the same research reveals nearly 55% of millennials say a poor mobile app experience would make them less likely to use a company’s products or services.

The global state of mobile and programmatic advertising

Truly integrated mobile advertising campaigns have long been thwarted by the inability to adequately use cookies for retargeting and profiling audiences on mobile. For too long marketers have overlooked the unique quality of the mobile device: its inherent mobility! The mobile device travels everywhere with the consumer. It is present at every location. It is easily transportable, easily accessed and is (nearly) always connected.

When consumers are only receptive to the most relevant and engaging marketing, a campaign for today’s consumer must be intelligent and, most of all, personalised. Our attendees shared examples of their favourite cases of brand personalisation with Starbucks’ capability to pre-order a hot drink online and pick-up in store being a favourite as a retailer taking steps to cut down the purchase journey. Panellists also admired startups, like Uber and Tinder, for changing up the taxi and dating worlds through innovative use of location targeting. These companies have created disruption within existing industries and our panel agreed that replicating this success will require brands to use relevant data to understand the time and the place where customers will be most receptive to their messages. This is where programmatic comes into its own.

The application of programmatic can drive efficiency and effectiveness in the media buying process. This is particularly relevant in mobile, where marketers can harness real-time location data in order to better understand where consumers are and what they are doing. In addition, advertisers are becoming well aware of the benefits of programmatic trading. We’ll start to see brand dollars flow in this direction with the growth of private marketplaces.

The customer data debacle

One of the publishers claimed their customer data was their most important resource their company owned. Our attendees agreed that data is essential to provide insight for programmatic campaigns. Marketers, when armed with this, are able to improve the everyday decisions they make when targeting consumers. Agency trading desks, publishers, media owners, and demand side platforms were also united in the desire to prioritise quality over quantity when it comes to collecting data. Location data, purchase history and webpage visitation were deemed important elements when building an accurate picture of the end consumer.

However, contentions arose when this publisher explained they were reluctant to share customer data with third parties with a perceived risk that their information would fall into competitor hands. These concerns highlight a much larger issue in the programmatic space: that many of our attendees feel the need for greater transparency and openness from technology providers.

Making the move to transparency

One of the major reasons brands are overlooking programmatic advertising on mobile is due to the lack of sophistication in targeting, as well as limited accuracy in measurement tools, which make it harder to justify upfront time and financial investment in programmatic. Measurement across mobile is also complex because of the changing customer purchase journey. For example, shoppers will often search for a product on their smartphone when on the go, but then visit a physical store to make the final purchase. The findings of our Mobile Path to Purchase report support this, showing that 31% of people visit a physical store during their search for a product, but that mobile devices are being used to search for store locations and business contact info.

The only way to make sense of this increasing fluidity between consumer movements on and offline, is by establishing clear attribution techniques like in-store calls to action within creatives, data collection at point of sale and integration with payments systems, such as Apple Pay. Media owners at our roundtable were particularly vocal about the need for increased transparency. The marketer who can confidently track and measure the impact that mobile is having on customer engagement levels will find it easier to justify their budgets, showcase their results, and ultimately prove their contribution to the business.

The panel of experts were united: we are moving into a mobile-first world, where marketers need to live and breathe mobile. The biggest opportunities will arise when marketers fully understand the strategic value of this handheld device and all parties will need to unite to improve transparency and measurement. Using mobile to understand the context of your consumer will be critical, and location and programmatic will play a key role in achieving this.