As the real-time subscription economy continues to grow, brands are constantly looking for effective ways to reach and engage their target audiences. Programmatic ad buying has been a popular strategy for brands to optimize their ad spend and campaign performance. It enables brands to automatic the buying and selling of digital ads, leveraging data and technology to optimize ad placements. 

However, despite its popularity, the real-time economy poses brands with a new set of challenges, especially when it comes to getting the most out of programmatic ad buying,  optimizing ad spend, and driving ROI. 

In this blog, we’ll explore some of the common pain points brands face when using programmatic ad buying, and how they can overcome these challenges.

Challenges in current programmatic ad buying strategies

1. 1. Speed & Real-Time Ad Buying 

In real-time ad bidding, where ad inventory is bought and sold in milliseconds, speed impacts the efficiency of the bidding process. Network connectively and siloed data can result in missed opportunities and lower bid success rates, leading to the potential loss of ad placements or reduced campaign performance. Brands and advertisers need to ensure they have real-time data availability to ensure smooth and efficient programmatic ad buying and bidding processes, and maximize their chances of winning ad placements and reaching their target audiences effectively. 

Ensuring that ad performance and metrics are measurable is crucial for brands that leverage programmatic ad buying. Brands need tools that can track and optimize their ad campaigns in real-time, ensuring that their ads are seen by the intended audience. 

Data insights, such as performance metrics, audience behavior, and campaign analytics, are critical for optimizing programmatic ad campaigns in real time. However, brands often deal with delays in getting those insights. Brands often rely on third-party analytics solutions to draw insights, but these solutions are time-consuming (and often costly) in that they require brand data to leave the environment and be processed in the third party’s environment.

In addition to the process of sharing data, third-party analytics often take a few hours or days to be generated—when brands need access to insights in real-time, as they’re happening. This leads to delays in identifying trends, patterns, and opportunities for optimization—as well as bidding in real-time in an efficient and competitive way. Timely and actionable data insights are essential for effective programmatic ad buying and bidding, allowing brands to make informed decisions and achieve better campaign performance. 

1. 3. Ad Fraud and Brand Safety 

Ad fraud is a persistent issue in the ad tech industry, and media and entertainment brands are not immune to its impact. With programmatic ad buying, brands may encounter fraudulent ad placements, invalid traffic, and brand safety risks. Advertisements may end up on fake websites, or appear next to inappropriate content, leading to potential damage to the brand’s reputation. Brands need to implement real-time robust ad verification and brand safety measures to mitigate ad fraud risks. 

1. 4. Lack of Transparency and Data Quality

Transparency and data quality are crucial in programmatic ad buying. Brands may face challenges in accessing accurate and reliable data for targeting and optimization. This can result in suboptimal targeting, wasted ad spend, and poor campaign performance. To overcome this challenge, brands need strong internal technical teams, or should consider partnering with reputable data providers and demand transparency from their programmatic partners. They should also invest in strategic data solutions to collect, analyze, and activate their first-party data for more precise targeting and personalization. 

1. 5. Ad Blocking and Ad Avoidance 

Ad blocking and ad avoidance behaviors are prevalent challenges for brands and advertisers. Ad blocking software prevents ads from being displayed, while ad avoidance behaviors, such as skipping ads or scrolling past them, reduce ad visibility and effectiveness. Brands need to create and track engaging and relevant ad experiences that resonate with their audiences to combat ad blocking and ad avoidance. This includes tracking ad performance in real-time, developing compelling ad creatives, leveraging interactive formats, and delivering personalized content that aligns with users’ interests and preferences.

1. 7. Creative Fragmentation and Ad Fatigue

Brands often face creative fragmentation challenges, as they need to create multiple ad versions to cater to different audiences, devices, and platforms. This can lead to ad fatigue, where users are overwhelmed with repetitive or irrelevant ads, resulting in lower engagement and performance. Diverse and compelling ad creatives can help combat these challenges, and brands should consider leveraging dynamic creative optimization to automate ad creation and delivery based on user data and contextual signals, providing personalized and relevant ad experiences. 

Supercharge Programmatic Ad Buying with Real-Time Customer Intelligence

Programmatic ad buying offers brands immense potential for reaching and engaging audiences effectively. However, the real-time subscription economy has made it challenging to execute effective programmatic ad buying. Brands face new challenges and in turn, must implement new strategies to stay competitive and optimize their ad spend and ROI. 

Scuba Analytics solves the challenges above and helps brands achieve their ad spend and campaign goals with real-time customer intelligence in the following ways:

• Ad spend and campaign optimization: With real-time insights, brands can track ad engagement (or lack thereof) and performance to minimize ad fatigue, ad blocking, and ad avoidance. Instead, brands can make in-flight changes to personalize ads and increase contextual relevance. In tandem, build machine learning models for adaptive ad buying & optimizing attribution measurement.
  
  
• Hyper-personalize ad campaigns: Use ultra-granular insights about customer behavior and interactions with ads to identify areas of success and opportunities to drive ROI, while providing relevant and contextual ads to users.
  

• Real-time sub-second campaign analytics: Optimize in-flight campaign performance to drive greater reach and frequency and inform future strategy.
  

• Quickly activate performance data: Eliminate lags in data collection and analysis, and get insights to inform ad buying decisions quickly. You don’t need to rely on third-party vendors to run your analytics or worry about cleaning data.  Scuba operates within your environment, eliminating and reducing risk.

Scuba’s modern architecture was built in the post-social network era to handle scale and truly democratize decision-making for marketing teams with actionable data. Scuba will enable you to complete in the real-time subscription economy like never before. Take us for a test drive and compare today.