How programmatic will transform media buy and other industries

Automation has a reputation for putting people's jobs at risk or force job descriptions to work around advances in technology.This also applies to programmatic buying, which automates tasks traditionally carried out by media buyers.How will the media buy industry be affected?  What about other industries such as marketing, advertising and publishing?To learn more about the present state of programmatic and what to expect for the future in Hong Kong, see Part 1 of the series while Part 2 will tell you why programmatic buy has not taken off in the city.Will media buyers lose their jobs if programmatic buying becomes more widespread?Siva Ganeshanandan, APAC digital marketing director at Adobe, said media buyers should be worried about their jobs."Media buyers don't add value - they sit between advertisers and publishers.  Programmatic buying won't shrink the media buy industry but it will distinguish the good and creative media buyers from the bad ones," he said."If media planners don't decide what their clients should buy and are simply filling spreadsheets, then they need to be reskilled.  Some media buyers will fear this because it changes the core of what they do."Yean Cheong, VP of marketing solutions Asia Pacific at Cadreon, says programmatic buying frees up resources, allowing media buyers to be more strategic and creative about their messaging such as innovating in terms of cross-device strategies."Right now, media buy involves lots of optimisation.  This gives our staff no time to plan good ideas," she said."Access to data is blurring the lines between media and broader content strategy."In her view, future media planners will be hybrid planners who think about communications holistically, rather than in silos such as online and offline or by platforms.Division of labour among media buyers should no longer be about the channel.  Instead, media buyers should give clients advice about the audiences and platforms they should go for before engaging in automated media buy.Extra training for media buyers about different types of channels and inventory in the field of programmatic buying is needed, as the media planning process becomes more complex."Media buyers shouldn’t feel their career is at stake – this presents an opening for them," Cheong said.Andy Chung, director Hong Kong at Xaxis, also does not foresee programmatic buying reducing the scope of work for media buyers."I see this as an opportunity for media buyers to get away from doing administration work and filling spreadsheets.  Programmatic buying will help agencies move away from the commoditised end of the buying process and move upstream where their true value can be realised," Chung said.However, to take up such a strategic roles means to media buy agencies need to start functioning as consultancies.Cheong said, "Some clients are very dictating, such as about what percentage of their expenditure should go to TV.  Marketers should stop doing that to agencies and to some extent, it's up to the agencies to ask the client to think about the customer journey and communicate accordingly."Karie Chan, platform director at Resolution, agrees that repetitive and computational tasks within media buy will become automated, giving media buyers more space to be creative."It's not that machines will replace humans.  Humans will be working with the machines," she said.Jackson Kwok, CEO at Omnicom Media Group Hong Kong added that machines could never replace the intuition and imagination of human beings."We need humans to make sense of, give meaning to and integrate the data, and then derive actionable insights and fine-tune creatives accordingly," he said."It's just the transactions and purchases by impression, which are automated."For Kwok, after programmatic buying becomes widespread, creativity in media buying will lie in content integration, media planning strategy and engagement."We need people to deliver graphics, integrated digital content strategy with programmatic buying, display advertising, SEM and offline advertising.  A human being is needed to do this type of integration that can generate interest in the target audience and a good user experience."Integrated media planners will be in high demand in the future," Kwok said.Programmatic buying uplifts the media buyer's role.  However, the rise of programmatic buying will mean that media buyers need to adopt a new mindset, which Kwok says is more difficult than re-training staff members."Your staff need to treat the buying and planning process as a business and have the commercial sense of wanting to increase conversion rates and market share for clients," Kwok said."Media buyers must evolve into the role of a consultant who helps the client think of and execute communications strategy in a business savvy way."At the same time, media buyers need to be able to analyse data and derive actionable strategies from them.  Kwok said it is easier to train search marketers in programmatic buying before all other teams in a company."It's easier for people who know search marketing to pick up programmatic because programmatic buying is similar," he said."It's harder for traditional media planners, some of whom are scared of data and technology."Media mix optimisation across digital platforms will be another skill that media buyers need to have under their belt, using insights from data derived from tracking online users."If you place cookies in all your digital channels, you can find out the quality of traffic entering your digital platforms in terms of conversion rates, rather than simply the quantity of traffic.  This data can then be used to optimise media mixes," Michelle Ho, head of marketing at Brand’s, said.There will still be a place for traditional online media buy, because it ensures that ads show up in a particular portal or page by locking in publishers with placement buys.In contrast, programmatic buying is about audience buy, where the client does not care which platform the ad appears in as long as it reaches the right audience."In programmatic buying, we can only tell you the demographics, behaviours and interests of the audience you want to buy.  There will still be demand for placement buy for clients who want to buy ad spaces in specific websites," Cheong said.Chung agrees."Both programmatic buying and traditional media buy have roles to play," he said."The trick becomes how brands can use data across their entire media plan to improve targeting and understanding of what ad sequence leads to a successful outcome."How programmatic buying will affect in-house marketers and marketing agenciesThe biggest concern among in-house marketers is how to the budget well after factoring in the expenses that come with programmatic buying.Ho said, "Programmatic buying requires extra investment but most marketers get approximately the same budget every year.  This raises the question of whether we should cut spending on traditional media.""The answer is yes, but during the shift from traditional to digital media, how do you balance out the mix of media you use?Meanwhile, Raymond Leung, head of digital at Mindshare, believes programmatic buying will drive marketers to be nimbler and develop a quicker workflow for fine-tuning and approving creatives."For ongoing creative optimisation in response to real-time data, marketers have to be more nimble.  Clients must reduce their reaction times so they can make quick decisions about creatives based on insights from data," he said.How the advertising industry will be affected"It's not just a cost-saving, media buying thing - programmatic buying extends to content and creative strategy," Cheong said."Creatives who think it won't affect them are shortsighted."The main impact on creatives is the demand for many different versions of ads for a range of digital channels such as websites and Facebook, which stems from the fact that programmatic buying opens up AB testing of creatives, which then need to be fine-tuned."The advertising industry must become reactive to feedback, especially to insights from data and test creative messaging and formats accordingly," Cheong said.Creatives play a major role in programmatic buying for Ganeshanandan, who said the relationship between creative content and its impact on the performance of ads is often overlooked."Programmatic buying seems to completely ignore creatives and judge the performance of ads using numbers.  But research shows that this is not the case.  In fact, the creative is the biggest variable for ad performance," he said.Apart from producing a large number of creatives to test on a variety of platforms, an enormous number of creatives is needed to make ads more personalised for certain customer segments for the sake of driving performance."For example, if you are working in the tourism industry in Hong Kong and Singaporeans like Hong Kong for the food, Indians prefer The Peak and Americans like Wanchai, then you can design three different creatives.  Specific versions of the creative will only show up in websites targeting visitors from those particular countries," Ganeshanandan said.Ad networks will also be impacted"There will be pressure on local ad networks unless they can shore up local publisher relationships and offer something unique to the market," Chung said.This is because with programmatic buying, local publishers will realise that they can offer their inventory directly to advertisers through an exchange system where they can manage yields themselves, avoiding the cost of reselling inventory through a middleman, he added.The effect of programmatic buying on publishersSalespeople working for publishers are currently divided into online and offline teams.  As programmatic buying becomes more widespread, instead of asking offline teams to switch over to selling digital inventory, the two types of teams should be combined to streamline operations, Kwok said."That way, campaigns can be much more integrated and there is less conflict or competition within the company between the two teams," Kwok said.Another way in which sales teams of media vendors need to reconsider their roles is to pick up strategic thinking, negotiation and data analysis skills, foregoing the daily grind of selling inventory."The relationships will still need to be there with senior agency buyers who can negotiate programmatic access.  But the day-to-day order makers and takers will no longer be there," Chung said."Instead, both sides will invest more in strategic personnel, strong senior negotiators and analytics functions to makes sense of the data generated."[Image]: Shutterstock