How open, conscientious, extraverted, agreeable – and neurotic – is programmatic? Jim Hodgkins, managing director, marketing services, VisualDNA, analyses the programmatic industry and sums up the challenges which still lie ahead.

What’s the first rule of marketing and advertising? Understand the customer and focus on their needs. We all know that if you can’t do that your brand probably won’t succeed. Currently, programmatic is suffering from a crisis of conscience and appears to have lost sight of that role.

Let’s draw a parallel close to our hearts at VisualDNA, instead of understanding consumers’ psychological types, our speciality, we’ll put the industry on the couch, understand it, and propose the course of treatment.

There is a psychological analysis process, respected by academics with a catchy name OCEAN – known as the 'Big 5'. It studies your Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. Together they strongly influence your motivations and character, they can even predict your credit rating and participation in fraudulent activity.

Are we too open as an industry?

Open people are progressive and welcome change, they make great advertising targets and are often early adopters.

Programmatic is open and has initiated change and progression in advertising. But that openness has a downside, as programmatic has opened the door to some aggressive gatecrashers, who have turned up to trash our home whilst we’re trying to grow up and have fun.

Are we conscientious?

Conscientious people like a well-ordered environment, arrive on time, take responsibility, perhaps they are even a bit boring. Fragmentation in our industry means no strong parental oversight governing programmatic behaviour and a lack of conscientiousness, many are in it for what they can get out of it – and quickly.

Social and Search, through Facebook and Google, manage the user experience closely with clear accountability and control of the balance of their advertising, whilst programmatic appears to be spending too much time in the company of the 'wrong friends' who are pushing substances, such as fraudulent inventory and non-viewable impressions.

With such fragmentation no one has an overview of the sum of the parts, resulting in many unattractive issues for consumers, publishers, and of course the ones that pay, the brands.

Such an introverted character

What does go on in ad tech? It never tells anyone. Why is programmatic so shy of coming forward and declaring its modus operandi? There are curtains drawn and the teenager is in denial about much of its behaviour.

No wonder. Over half of the client's spend fails to reach the publisher – are you kidding me?! It makes a currency exchange bureau taking a 20% cut, which I find tough to understand, seem like good value.

Certainly not agreeable

Even worse, society has had enough of the programmatic teen and are avoiding it, throwing up adblockers to protect their digital experience. Consumers are defending themselves from the teenager's stroppy stone throwing of retargeting sales messages ordering them to "buy now".

With the actual, rather than metaphorical, younger generations leading the charge to block ads, this is particularly alarming.

Neurotic participants

At ATS London, Terry Kawaja predicted that of 2,500 broadly ad tech businesses, only 150 will meet the success criteria of an exit to a strategic investor.

This stat highlights the low emotional, as well as financial, stability with many of the programmatic participants not making it to their graduations. Ad tech is a highly neurotic community bound together by fear of failure to a greater degree than signals of success.

Neurotics constantly self analyse, review and regret actions and struggle to develop a clear positive engagement with the surrounding world. Sounds familiar?

The programmatic development

The great news is that many awkward teenagers turn into model citizens, even influential and successful ones, so how do we do that?

Understanding who people are and communicating messages that resonate rather than revolt, which inspire rather than incite, should be possible. People are ever more keen to share their lives through connected devices with apps and publishers. This should be an amazing time for advertisers to really understand people and engage with them in ways that entertain and delight them.

One of the great strengths of TV advertising is that it delivers a story to follow, characters to relate to, emotions triggered, humour and memorable moments. However, TV is stuck with the ailment that it can’t target one-to-one.

We can do this in digital, but we are wasting that ability by focussing on begging the audience to buy until they prevent us from appearing on their screens. We should be creating a respectful relationship between brand and customer.

At VisualDNA, we believe that understanding consumers is key, this means understanding their psychological traits, their motivations, their preferences, and tolerances. However, despite the deluge of data, the industry has yet to take advantage of this as a benefit for all stakeholders to:

– Create an environment where data is interpreted to understand and predict how a consumer engages one-by-one and in aggregate to advertising.

– Target advertising to people intelligently, based on their motivations and drivers.

– Understand when not to show adverts to people because they don’t want certain types of messages.

– Design an experience where the sum of the advertising they view on their screen gives a better online experience.

We believe that through developing the world’s largest database of psychological profiles we can better determine not only who sees which advertisements but the creative content of those adverts and that VisualDNA will be an important part of the future of digital advertising.