Five Reasons Programmatic Should Be Kicked to the Curb
Pesach Lattin ✓ just wrote this -- Five Reasons Programmatic is Here to Stay
I will provide counterpoints to each of the points below, quoted from his article.
1. Programmatic advertising is a great way to scale your ad campaigns quickly and easily.
Yes, that is if you don't care that the scale is not "human" scale. Real human audiences are finite; the amount of time they spent online consuming content is finite. The "scale" of ads in programmatic have been completely out of whack from reality for the last decade.
It's all fake scale. Note the "loudest alarm clock app" that no one has heard of before, is selling 3.2 billion impressions per month (how many minutes do humans use alarm clock apps per day?). Those quantities are larger than ESPN, and nearly as large as Hulu and Spotify. Hmmm.
2. Programmatic ad buying is one of the most efficient ways to reach your target market.
Adtech vendors and agencies have deliberately or ignorantly foisted the term "cost efficiency" on unsuspecting advertisers, causing them to think that "we got such a great deal in programmatic because the CPM prices are lower." That is flawed thinking. Yes, you used to pay $30 CPMs to real publishers, now you pay $3 CPMs in programmatic. But you are buying 10X more quantity now, so you are still spending $30 total ($3 CPM x 10X quantity). You did NOT save any money and you did not get a good deal. In fact you got a crappy deal because the extra 90% of impressions you are buying now are all faked. The large quantities of ads, the low CPM prices, and the high clicks are all driven by bot activity. Fake sites and fake mobile apps can sell enormous quantities of ads at really low CPM prices because, unlike real publishers, fake sites have no costs of content. And no scruples will hold them back from loading 6,562 ads and trackers on a single page to maximize profits.
Recommended by LinkedIn
3. By using data to target your ads specifically to people who are interested in what you're selling, you can make sure that your message is seen by the right people at the right time.
Audience targeting is bull sh**
4. In the world of online advertising, data is king.
Yes, but more data doesn't mean people understand it or use it, or use it correctly. And it doesn't mean the data is accurate. Furthermore, bad guys are actively falsifying the data, so you must have a way to determine what data is real vs faked in the first place. Remember the Uber lawsuit where they are suing 100 mobile exchanges for falsifying the data and claiming credit for app installs that had already occurred? And see the video below where false data is written directly into Google Analytics. The traffic didn't occur; but over 10,000 simultaneous visitors appear to be on the site at once.
5. CMOs, if you're not doing programmatic advertising, your competitors will be and they'll have a leg up on reaching potential customers with their ads.
A smart CMO would let competitors waste all their money in programmatic digital media and reach fake customers at scale.
Here's what to do instead: How to do digital marketing properly
Digital Marketing Director at NSI Industries | Marketing Center of Excellence
2yApparently Pesach Lattin has never installed your code on his campaigns. If he had, he may have seen what you are pointing out. He is only spouting what all the programmatic platforms claim. The real work in making programmatic campaigns work (IMHO) is to know the real results and track down to the nth degree to ensure your media spend is attributable. GA4 will help this, but if you want programmatic to work then you'll need to roll up your sleeves and really define where your best converting traffic is coming from and then skinny it down to just those sources. The platforms hate when you do that, but your ROAS will love you.
Get things done inexpensively and efficiently.
2yI think it's the open market that should be kicked to the curb. Programmatic direct deals, especially guaranteed deals (which we are working to make easier to book), with quality pubs leveraging the pub's first party data is a fine alternative to "automated guaranteed deals (which admittedly needs further automation-- and yes, we are working on this too!).
Helping mid-sized organizations increase sales and improve customer service since 1993 | #LinkedInLocal
2yThat must be SOME alarm clock!